The Clockwork Beauty
by Ellen Weaver
Summary: A lonely Beast rediscovers a love he lost in an android named Beauty. She must preserve her fragile clockwork soul against his darker passions… for the Beast is mad, and cruel…and perhaps beyond saving.
1. Broken Rose

**The Clockwork Beauty**

* * *

A lonely Beast rediscovers a love he lost in an android named Beauty. She must preserve her fragile clockwork soul against his darker passions… for the Beast is mad, and cruel…and perhaps beyond saving.

Written as part of the Fairy-Tale Challenge: Retell "Beauty and the Beast" in the Labyverse using randomly chosen genres. For the sister tales that accompany this one, please direct your attention to TheRealEatsShootsandLeaves ("True Git"), and Jalen Strix ("The Beast Within").

**Author's note updated 8/30/16:** After extensive revisions, I'm reposting the first five chapters of this story under original title and reviews. Some of the changes I've made are small, and some are large, but I'm trying to tell a much longer story than I first anticipated. My apologies and thanks to reviewers whose positive commentary has been deleted. You've helped me.

I began writing this story with the secret, childish notion that it was a sequel to Labyrinth where David Bowie could reprise his role as the Goblin King, just as he was, in the reality of his aged body and his dazzling laser-sharp talent. With his death in January 2016, I had to re-evaluate the Beast's character and motives, especially in the wake of "Blackstar" and the devastating and powerful music videos Bowie was determined to create in his last days. It's a much more serious story than some others I've tried to write, but it's also become a much kinder one than what I'd originally intended. Please enjoy.

* * *

**Chapter 1: The Broken Rose**

Apparently with no surprise  
To any happy flower,  
The frost beheads it at its play  
In accidental power.

The blond assassin passes on,  
The sun proceeds unmoved  
To measure off another day  
For an approving God.

Emily Dickinson: "Death and Life."

* * *

Twilight is coming hard on the phosphorescent edges of sunset, as a dwarf steals into a forbidden garden.

Behind him, or more properly, them—the dwarf and what he carries—there is the world. Ruined cities collapse under their own weight, crusts of suburbs hedging them about, long-long-ago abandoned. Every so often, far away from these sad and empty places, there will be a more modern enclave more recently abandoned. In these places, designed like the encounter suits that all living beings must wear to protect themselves from the harm that is the world, there is almost always a garden. Their protective fields are shattered or stuttering on, hoarding their bounty for nobody.

The dwarf, like these gardens, is an anomaly in this dead world. He is a living creature, a beast of the flesh, whose body must be shielded from radiation, poison, plague, and the thousand other forms of slow death that linger in the inimical world-that-is. He carries heavy burdens. Twined about his body are thongs and parcels and pockets and pouches to hold the loot he has amassed from the broken world, things that can be repaired, polished, and bartered to amass what passes for wealth in this day and age. He holds one item carefully to his breast, one perfect salvage that he has never yet sold.

This most prized possession is the ruined head and torso—not even all the torso, for she is missing a shoulder and arm—of a beautiful android. The hair is gone, and the eyes are dull, and if not for the wreck of gears and skeletal tail of her metallic spine peeping from beneath the edge of too-perfect skin, she could pass for the sad remnants of a human being. But no. Her remaining arm grasps the dwarf's shoulder, and a strong cord is knotted so that the dwarf can carry her, sling-fashion, in a close embrace. When she speaks—for she can speak if she chooses to—she calls the dwarf "Father."

"Father," she says, in a reedy child's voice, having no belly to give her resonance, "Story?"

In her dilapidated and dried-out state, she must hoard articulations like gold until such time as Father can pilfer more biotic gel to lubricate her leaky innards. She wants to know if there will be time to rest, time to speak, time to tell Father a story out of her trivial skull-shaped library. When she recites these stories, in basic pieces, she fills in the gaps in her own mind, gaps of words, of color, the memories of another life even further back than the once-upon-a-time, like a dream of a remembered dream.

"Later, Beauty," her father says gruffly. This is not the clockwork girl's name—she does not remember her name. She has very little personal memory of the once-upon-a-time— but it is the name the dwarf calls her, when he does not call her 'Daughter.' "Once we're rested, you can chatter me something." His voice is muffled by the mask of his encounter suit, and she twists her head over one perfect pale shoulder to watch him insert the scrambler-key into the nearly invisible protective field that borders this garden. A conical hole opens in the field, just enough for a hobbling dwarf and his unlikely burden to fit through.

"How's the air, Beauty?" he asks her, and she tastes the air with her lips and soft palate, finding it smooth and mellow, rich in moisture, chemically uncomplicated. It is a more thin and rarefied air than it could be, but it is breathable, and unpoisoned. She is happy to be of use. "Safe, Father."

The dwarf rips off his mask and breathes in the clean air with pleasure and gratitude. He turns his head and brushes his wizened cheek against her smooth one.

"Let's get you settled," he says. Her father tenderly unwraps her from his body and lays her down under a tree in this forbidden garden. She digs herself into the yielding turf, microfilaments of her spinal ducts probing out slowly, into the moist earth, drinking up water and nitrogen and carbon. It feels good to stretch. When Father takes her to cobblin markets and mecha fairs, bartering his pilfered goods or trading for repairs, she is hidden, folded up in a sack. Sometimes he will surreptitiously ask her questions about the repair of ancient technology, and she will assist him. Dutiful daughter that she is, she is proud and glad to help her father. But here, nothing is required of her, only to look and to see, and so she looks up.

In the nighttime wilderness of the broken world, the only constant beauty is the stars. In the dark, they are visible. They are bright enough for a mecha girl to see, even if her eyesight is failing. People might live up there on those points of light, many of them, perhaps almost all of them. Perhaps some of them are looking down at the Earth and at her, but it is more likely that they are indifferent to the world left behind, indifferent to the very few people who remain to eke out their lives here. The meek have inherited the Earth, truly. The mecha people, clockwork people like Beauty, or clockwork animals, humanity's abandoned toys, are almost all that is left of humanity on the Earth. Beauty blinks rapidly, clearing the lenses of her psuedoflesh eyes with precious, precious water.

She looks around with serenity and without fear.

The clockwork Beauty is innocent of the knowledge of good and evil.

She finds it strange that Father should have come so directly to this garden, the most perfect yet, when discovering others has been a matter of luck or careful and cautious work, but she does not question him. She watches him make himself busy. This garden is a rich place. Roses grow in tangled profusion, and trees heavy with a burden of fruit. She cannot remember a time when she saw so much green and growing.

The dwarf is quick, very quick, in his plundering. Samples he takes of all the edible fruits, and digs up a few flowers, wraps them root-bundled in cloth, stows the booty in one of his innumerable satchels. She has seen him do this before.

Father pauses underneath one overhanging lip of bramble, where a peach-colored rose grows, all the colors of sunset in its petals. It bobs under the weight of the dwarf's tread on the tangled vines below, as if smiling, as if offering itself.

"Pretty," Beauty says, with longing.

"Can't last," the dwarf says, with repressed anger. She is untroubled; she knows the anger is not meant for her. "Nothin' beautiful lasts. 'Cept maybe you, Beauty."

She sorrows for the rose. She wants to comfort it, to understand it. "I want it," she says. She is not asking, exactly. Either her father will give it to her or he will not, and she will not complain or remonstrate if he refuses. Still, she wants it. "Please," she says.

He looks over at her, and his paper-crumpled wrinkled face eases from its perpetual expression of anxious irritation into a loving smile. He plucks the rose, and there is a whispered snap as the tangle of rose-briar releases its prize. He brings it to her, and holds it under her nose. "Smell," he instructs her, and she does. Her eyes are no longer keen, but her nose is. She can smell the flower, or analyze it at least. Leaving behind dry chemical formulae, she is aware that it is sweet, and slightly acrid, and carries the scent of clean water. It is beautiful.

"Mine," she says, smiling. He leaves the rose in her hand as he turns to amass more loot.

Beauty sings a soft song to the rose, stroking its soft, soft petals with her fingertips. Her voice is so quiet that even the dwarf's sharp ears never hear. Teach me love, she sings to the rose. Teach me about death, for you are most beautiful now that you've been plucked, now that you have begun to die, now that you are mine, rose.

She decides on the story she will tell Father. It is a story of a poor father who takes hospitality in a magic place, and steals a rose for his most precious daughter. There is a beast in the story, and she feels the longing to see him, even though she knows she never will.

Therefore, when the Beast appears, it is as if she has summoned him herself, with the repressed force of her own longings. She is dumbstruck by her own power.

He comes in a gust of wind and ferocious thunder, blazing with fury. He is a beast, a King of Beasts indeed. Pale as mammal's milk, his encounter suit's convex heart-shaped masks mimics an owl's head, with deep pits of smoked glass for his eyes. Wings of air translators poke up over his back like feathers.

"You dare!" he roars, and the dwarf cowers. "How dare you steal my rose?" An accusing finger, gloved and plated in white talons, points at the bare space on the branch, the broken place bright as stigmata on the dark vine. "You come here empty-handed and raid my garden like it was your private pantry, and breathe my air, and then you break my best rose, before it could even seed." The Beast's voice is as lovely as music, though angry. "You useless menace. Why have you done this?"

Yes, thinks the clockwork Beauty. I know who he is. I know this story.

"I didn't think you were still around," the dwarf admits, defiant but cowering. "Been about a half-century. It was just a rose, goin' to waste by the looks of things. What's the harm?"

"Oh?" The Beast reaches forward and grabs Father by the ear. "You have two ears, and one is going to waste. Suppose I take this ear? Or one of your eyes? You sniveling thing!"

Beauty does not like this. No, she thinks, aghast, as Father yelps in pain.

"Don't hurt him!" Beauty cries, more loudly than she imagined she could.

Everything is silent now, in the garden as the two asymptotes of masculine attention convene upon her.

"Beauty, be quiet!" the dwarf admonishes, but it is too late. She's been seen and named.

"Don't hurt my father," she repeats.

The Beast stares hard at Beauty through his mask, and then at the dwarf. When he speaks again, his voice is softer.

"Is that a Caesura model?" he asks the dwarf, pinching his ear for emphasis.

"Yes!" the dwarf squeals, batting his hands against his captor. "I think so. But she's broken. Never thought you'd want her!"

"You never thought. Of course you didn't." The Beast let the dwarf go and gives him a kick for motivation. "You were a fool to bring her with you. Or were you wise? You always had an eye for a good bargain." He comes to where Beauty had planted herself and goes down on one knee before her.

When he speaks to her, his voice is gently coaxing, as if there were no violence in him at all. But she knows better. Ah yes, she knows.

"You look as though you are wearing my garden as a dress, Beauty." He caresses the rose in her hand with gloved fingertips. "I have a proposition for you. Will you trade your life for your father's? Be Beauty to my Beast, bought for the price of a perfect rose?"

A beast, she thinks. He is a beast of the flesh, alive. He is a man. For reasons she can't explain, this thought sinks her non-existent heart within her. He is one of the masters. But, she thinks… he knows stories. He knows the stories I know. She answers him by reaching out for him with her one good arm, putting herself into his care.

He plucks her up more easily than Father had plucked the rose.

"Please," the dwarf weeps, and Beauty is comforted to know that even if he has ultimately sold her, Father does at least love her and regret the selling. "Be kind to her," Father says. "She's not like the others. She's like a child. Please. Be kind to her."

"You must pay him," she instructs the Beast. "More than his life. My worth to you." The Beast looks down at her. He traces the arc of her orbital sockets gently, gently.

"Very well," says the Beast. His ugly mask turns to the dwarf. "Payment, then. Keep what you've stolen, and take an hour longer to take anything else you fancy. Steal more plants, take as much water as you can carry. It's all potable here. Then begone. Go out into those wastelands you love so much and see if you can find more of her kind—or if she isn't the last." He holds her against his ribs with a grip of steel. "But if you come back here again, empty-handed and thieving… it will go badly for you, dwarf."

The Beast carries her off then, and she realizes she might never see Father again. She struggles to catch one last glimpse of him. The Beast helps her, lets her head peep out over his shoulder. "Goodbye," she calls out to him. "Father, goodbye!" Tears seep out from under her lids as she is borne away, because there is no answer.

"Don't cry," the Beast admonishes her kindly, his strides taking them both deeper into the lush overgrowth and bounty of his mysterious kingdom. "Not for him. I will give you so much more than he ever could. "

"No," she says, quietly fierce. "I _will_ cry."

His relentless stride pauses, as if she has surprised him. She feels his ribcage shudder, and realizes he is laughing at her. "Precious thing," he says, laughter amplified beneath his owl's mask. "Rose with defiant thorns. You will do as I tell you." The gloves on his encounter suit rudely probe the fused circuits of her exposed spine, and not gently.

"I will cry. I am sad," she says simply. His arm keeps her confined, and she sighs and holds on to him, closing her eyes.

"Yes, well, if you're sad you must cry," he replies. "Beauty, if that's to be your name, your kind have the ability to feel, which is not always an advantage. You may feel more sorrow yet, and fear being here with me, but making you unhappy isn't my aim." He holds her out in front of him and she can see her own reflection in the black glass hiding his eyes. "Remember your promise. You belong to me, now and forever. Before the dwarf found you, you were mine. Before the stars fell up and people were thick upon the earth, you were mine."

His clever fingers find the connection he had been looking for. She ceases to cry, ceases to question, and enters unconsciousness as he turns her off.

* * *

For the first time since Father had rescued her from beneath the rubble of a demolished building, she is having a dream. It is a strange dream, one in which she is instructing a technician, or perhaps a lover, in her diagnostic and repair schematics. At the same time, she is also in a park, reciting psychosexual prose to a bored-looking owl. "Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, connect the fifth thoracic vertebra to the columnar nanite node. For my will is as strong as titanium alloy, though not as brittle…" The clockwork Beauty gasps, and falls into nothingness again.

Later, words. Questions, answers. "Do you feel this?" her interlocutor asks, and she can feel the pin prick on the skin of her inner arm, making her hand twitch reflexively, and she says, sleepily, "Yes."

She has the feeling of having been asked and having answered this question many, many times in the past several hours, several days. Time has passed in twilight sleep.

"Do you feel this?" Again, the light pricking, not quite pain, and she can feel it, she can feel it exquisitely! Sensation, flesh, so real, and the clockwork Beauty says "Yes!" with a flush of warmth in her voice as she realizes she's receiving information from a limb she thought she had long since lost.

She reaches out with her hand, quick as a flash, and grabs the wrist of the technician, the one who has repaired her. His wrist is warm, naked. It beats with blood. She can feel the cuff of a plastic glove that covers his hand, feel the delicate carpal bones grinding together under the strength of her grasp.

He makes a quiet sound of pain. It is _him_. It is the Beast. Without the mask of his encounter suit, his voice is even more exquisitely beautiful.

"You're awake," he says. "I didn't mean for you to wake so soon. " She squeezes his wrist again, the only response she can think of. "Beauty," the Beast said chidingly. "I am not a machine or a mutation or mechanically enhanced. I'm delicate. Is it your desire to hurt me?"

She lets him go. "No, Master." Her voice is dulcet, lubricated with gel. She touches her face, smooths her hands along her torso, down her legs… she exists. She is whole. "You fixed me, Master?"

"I'm not your master, Beauty," he says. She hears him grunt with effort as he stands.

"But you must be, if you own me." she says. "Why am I blind?"

"You've been tended in extremely neglectful fashion." His voice is curt with unsaid recriminations against Father. "You woke earlier than your eyes. They were so damaged that I had to replace them. Your internal repair systems need time to create new cortical links. When they do, your sight _will_ return, I promise. Everything will be right with you, now that you're here with me."

She can feel the warmth of his physical presence, the scent of his breath as he speaks, and she knows he is somehow exposed, or undressed, undone from his armor. His thumb caresses her face.

"How soon? I would like to see you," she says. She presses her cheek against his hand, consciously responding to his unconscious commands.

"No, you wouldn't," he says. His touch leaves her, and she is lonely for it. She sways forward, standing upright, able to carry herself for the first time in she doesn't know how long. There is a rug under her bare feet. (_"Come on, feet."_) She takes a step, and stumbles into his saving arms.

She clings to him, bending to him the way that the vine submits to the trellis. His heartbeat under her ear is quick with surprise. With her body, she can feel the soft skin of his bodystocking, the pipettes running like veins under the cloth to regulate temperatures to sustain life, the snaps and contact points that provide fastening and interface to the discarded pieces of his encounter suit. There are also parts of a metallic exoskeleton worn over this inner layer, making hard plated ridges against her arms.

"Thank you," she says. She can feel how alive he is, how perfect his form. Nothing in him feels monstrous. ""Thank you, Master!" She slides her hands over his shoulders, wanting to touch his face, but he eases her away from him, back into her chair.

He is afraid of _me_, she thinks, and is wondrously alarmed.

"Beauty," he says. "Delightful as your humility is, I have told you, I'm not your master, nor will I ever be. It is you who are mistress here. It is I who must obey you. I'm just the Beast."

"As in the story," she says, but she is doubtful.

"Beauty, you must go softly, you must go gently, or you'll undo all my hard work. You are the last Caesura android. Your price is above rubies, above water. You mustn't be broken, in body or mind, or you won't be able to do what I need you to do."

"To break your enchantment," she says, suddenly certain. "Are we to dine together tonight, Beast?"

"If you like," he says, and she hears the uncertainty in him. Afraid of me? she wonders. Afraid _for_ me?

"Yes. At dinner, you will propose to me. I will say yes. I will transform you. I will break the spell. I will break it now, if you like." She turns over her shoulder, blind, and smiles out at where he stands. "I will help you." She is overjoyed at the prospect of cutting through the difficult interstices of words and forms and relationships and moving directly to the answer he needs. She knows this story; she is certain.

"You would do that?" She can hear that she has upset him, somehow. "After I bought you from your father, and took your freedom, and made you cry? You'd chain yourself to me for your life? Why would you ever do that?"

"Because I am grateful," she says. "I am grateful to you. I am in one piece because of you." And now she can smell his anger, like a stink in the air. "Why are you angry? What wrong thing have I said?" she asks.

"Your gratitude is surprising. _You_ are surprising, Beauty. You're so… You unnerve me." He draws half a breath, as if to say more, but doesn't.

She hears the faint sound of a door opening. He is cold now, commanding. "You mustn't venture outside your room alone, not until your sight returns. A servant will guide you to me when it's time. But Beauty, prepare yourself. I will propose to you tonight, but it won't be the proposal you remember from your fairy-tale story. It's I who'll break the spell, and you who will transform."

"Wait—" she begs, but the door closes on her words. He is behind the door now, and she is alone, alone for the first time she cares to remember. She is not sure what the feeling is, leaping from the pit of her belly and cracking her shoulderblades together.

Is it fear?


	2. Grave-sent

**Chapter 2: Grave-sent**

Alone, deserted on the wave-worn sands,  
All woebegone, lo! ARIADNE stands;  
In wild amaze, as newly roused from sleep,  
Her full eye stretched upon the raging deep;  
Confused, distracted, motionless, forlorn:  
While perjured THESEUS, on the billows borne,  
Behind him leaves the solitary shores,  
And the fond maid, who, all too late! Deplores  
That weakness, which admitted to her breast  
The rude despoiler of her fame and rest.

Catullus: "Ariadne Forsaken."

* * *

Her sight does return, just as the Beast had promised, though slowly and over the course of many waiting hours. She tests herself as she waits, stretching each joint, laying her hands against her own restored flesh, feeling the ugly scars against her torso where old skin has been joined to new. They will fade, she knows. The repair nodes, full of busy nanites, have been rejoined to her system, and they will heal almost everything that might still be broken.

There is one new apparatus to her body that she does not recognize. It is a pearl, organic, embedded in the hollow of her throat. It throbs with heat when she touches it.

She blinks once, twice, aware of movement before her; she is staring in a mirror at her own face. Beauty doesn't recognize herself, having never seen herself before. She looks like woman who was a girl not too long ago. Her breasts are gentle swellings against the clinging softness of her bodystocking, and her face is unlined by experience or personality.

She winks first one eye, then the other, observing the length of her lashes, shutters of blackness in her face, hiding green iris windows. There is hair upon her head, too, thick hair, the dark-brown of fertile earth. She tilts her head forward, and back, feeling how heavy it is, feeling it brush against her lower spine. The weight of it surprises her. Long as it is, the Beast must have set it to growing almost before he did anything else. Her hair came first for him, a necessity, and her eyesight an afterthought. He had enjoyed caressing her hair; he hadn't enjoyed the prospect of her eyes caressing him. She looks inward at herself and her programming, and stops the hair growth. It is a wasteful extravagance of resources, such a wealth of hair, but then, the Beast is rich as Pluto in all the things that matter in the world-that-is.

She reaches out unthinking to the vanity table where the mirror stands and finds a hairclip right where she left one, long-long-ago in some dream. She pins back a wing of hair to keep it from obscuring her vision. There is also a red cylinder on the table. She picks it up and hears voices in her head.

_("Here's a treasure. You'll want that, won't you, my dear. Put it on, make yourself up!"_ )

Lipstick. She uncaps the cylinder and rolls the thick tube of paint up and down until the spiral bore inside it breaks. Her lips are already red, red as the coral beads that hang in a careless jumble with peridots and metallic plastic shamrocks and ropes of diamonds and jade plaques looped over the hinges of the mirror.

Nothing is familiar, but she feels as if she ought to remember everything. There is a pale bed in the corner with a canopy and a patchwork quilt printed out of one single piece of fabric. Boxes and toys on the shelves. A line of books and games against one wall.

She stands up, wobbly on her feet, and moves through the room. She picks up one of the books and opens it with anticipation—but the pages are empty. She rummages through the toys and the garishly-printed cardboard boxes of games, standing precariously on her vanity stool to reach the highest shelves. The boxes are as stingy as the books, empty inside. Even the toys are unyielding, without scent or wear. She throws a prickly stuffed teddy bear at the mirror in sudden frustration. She doesn't understand why a place that seems so familiar can be so completely empty of meaning.

The mirror only tips, turning its face to reflect the white tile overhead, the salmon carpet below, and the bear falls to the floor, unwanted.

"There was something I was looking for," she says, "…someone." She flounces herself onto the bed and buries her face in the pillows, frustrated, confused, sad. The bed at least feels familiar, and safe, even though it is as scentless and sterile as everything else.

The clockwork Beauty is forlorn. No Father, to speak to her in kindness. No Beast, who has left her alone in this agonizingly hollow room. This feeling brings a long-forgotten memory with it. She remembers the last time a companion abandoned her. She suddenly remembers Cesare.

* * *

_"Give your report, Cesare," she had said again and again, trying to mimic the impersonal and demanding tones of the masters. They had been buried together for days, months, weeks. He responded to nothing but orders, being of a different model, a different class, rather inflexible and unimaginative. But he had been her only companion. She couldn't see him in the darkness of the rubble, under the weight that couldn't be shifted, and she couldn't feel her body below the collarbones. "Cesare, report!"_

Every day she did this, call and response. At first he described the movements of the mecha insurgency making war on their enclave, or what was known of tactical movements and supply lines before the power was cut, a dutiful servant to terrible masters. But the masters weren't under threat anymore; the worst had already happened. She could smell other bodies, human bodies, in the wreckage around her, but they were past help or need. There was only Cesare and Beauty, alone in the dark together.

In the fourth week, Cesare's voice had begun to stutter. By the sixth month, he had only made a strange subvocal humming. And then nothing. Cesare had given up. He had died and left her alone. Nothing and aloneness, alone alone alone. First she had cursed him for his silence. Then she had screamed, for days, for days. And then… it must have been a kind of madness that had made her try to die, too. She had shut herself off until Father's kindly face had woken her.

* * *

Remembering, Beauty cries for dead Cesare, with gentle sobs that won't pull at her scars or damage any of her knitting innards.

She can feel other memories ready to bloom, quickening like the sensation of her flesh or the push of expanded emotions. Like her broken body, they seem to have laid dormant, waiting for the right conditions to flower. They are hers, surely as her skin, but she is afraid of having these memories unfold. She rubs the tears from her eyes with the heels of her hands, doing it at first to see and then for the blessed sensation of wet skin.

I want to see the stars, she thinks. I will go out, and I will see the stars, and the garden.

Beauty shoves herself off the bed. There is a piece of clothing on the peg by the door, a long sleeveless dress of gossamer. She puts it on over the bodystocking she is already wearing—almost like the Beast's, but without the exoskeleton and the thermal piping that delicate animal flesh required—and cinches the sash-ribbon fiercely.

The door to this horrid room is flat dull metal. It has no doorknob, but she remembers the Beast gave it no command. It simply opened for him when he wanted. "Open," she tells the door, wondering if the Beast has locked her in. He hadn't prohibited her from leaving , not precisely, not if she could see.

"Open!" she tells the door again, and feels the pearl at her throat throb with heat and light. She pounds on the door with her fist. "Open!"

The door slides open; she gasps in relief. Light blinds her again, but she picks up her trailing skirts in both hands and runs into the hallway before the door can change its mind.

She is still unsteady, and she scrapes herself against the wall more than once before her eyes adjust to the bright emptiness of it all. The long corridor is a seamless white, like an egg, and full of slow internal curves that distort her sense of space. She stops running after a time, wondering if she's just moving in circles. She wishes she had thought to wear at least one of the necklaces. She could have dropped a jewel every twenty paces. She wishes she had brought her lipstick. She could have drawn arrows to mark her path.

No turns or corners or anything! Beauty thinks in frustration. It just goes on and on!

_("It's full of openings, just you ain't seein' em.")_

Yes. She mustn't take anything for granted. She looks closer at the corridor.

There are seams in the walls where other doors belong. She puts her hand on the nearest one. "Open," she commands it. The jewel at her throat flashes, the door slides open with a small woosh of air betokening vacuum. She is blown in with the luxurious breathable air, which she does not need.

It is a room, a long room, a storeroom, with stacks and stacks of canvasses laid against the walls like so much cottager's woodpile. The air is scented lightly with linseed oil and varnish, and infinitesimally tiny flecks of paint gather at the base of these paintings, bright dust. She tiptoes inside, fascinated. She inspects one vertical stack: portrait orientations, pre-Raphaelite school. But she damages the paintings in looking at them. Paint chips fall off with bits of canvas; a stretched frame breaks to pieces and the painting shrivels like a salted slug. Merlin's perfect face dissolves under Nimue's open book. She leaves abruptly, upset by the damage she's done.

She tries other doors in quick succession, doors that open on rooms housing art—not as in a museum, but rather the Tetris-style stacking of an Egyptian tomb, grave goods of one type crammed in together with only a slim aisle for walking. There is a room for stone statuary, and one for bronze, and one of earthenware. Beauty opens yet another door, expecting more joyless hoarder's stash, and is pleased to find a room obviously much-used—for it has an atmosphere—and designed to show its treasures off to the viewer.

In this room, headless mannequins gracefully model men's clothing. She had never imagined that clothing could be art, but it must be, because it is here with the other rooms that house art. She is intensely curious, and these pieces of clothing present themselves for her examination. She walks down the aisle, each step moving her a decade into the past.

Beauty pauses before one set of clothes, feeling… that strange feeling she had in her bedroom. These clothes invoke intimidated confusion and familiarity: a pair of close-fitting breeches, a cloak of tatters, scabrous brown as oak-bark, a riding-jacket of red, red, red, pulsating spilled blood, with golden worms eating through the metal scapular and vambrace. The dummy models these clothes with lifeless arrogance, above her on their riser, doll-hands on doll-hips thrust rudely forward. She turns away, embarrassed for reasons she can't quite understand.

Opposite her, waiting for her, a suit of midnight-blue velvet, midnight-blue silk, sparkling with stardust that has shaken down into the cuffs and shoulders… she remembers a face, the face that ought to hover over that jewel-stuck cravat like the moon over black ice. This face mocks her and entices her, and then is gone before she can properly recall it. Not a handsome face, but a beautiful one nonetheless, with a predatory and evaluative sneer.

Beauty steps up on the riser where these clothes wait, and she can smell the man who once wore these clothes, all acid champagne and peaches and warm summer rain over the alluring scent of the masculine animal in rut. She sighs and leans her head against the breast of these clothes, clutches the dummy's collarbones, imagining for one moment that the lifeless arms might come around her and hold her, and console her, and lead her somewhere…

The dimensions of these arms and shoulders are exact to those of the Beast. She grabs the shoulders of the diamante-pricked tight, and feels them part like cobwebs under her fingers. She steps away. The jacket plops into rot and the loose gems of the cravat-pin scatter like particulate matter.

"No," she says, but the damage is done. The velvet scraps in her hands evaporate into fibers. She's killed it.

Her heart beats quickly as she retreats from this room like a thief, and continues her exploration of this tomb. Her internal gimbals tell her that she is moving slowly and gradually downward, along a spiral path. She opens another door, and then stands there in horror at what she sees as the lights flicker on.

It is a room of corpses, the corpses of beautiful women. Bluebeard! she thinks. Bluebeard and his wives!

But these are not corpses. There are only pieces, not the whole. Mecha parts are stored in sterile environments under glass and protective fields, arms and legs and torsos hung in clamps, waiting to be joined together. There are no faces, no heads, no brains in this room, only limbs and pseudoflesh and the means to repair broken clockwork women.

This is where I come from, she thinks, running her hands over her torso, her hips, her new arm.

There is a machine in this room, a press for printing out artificial skin. She leans over a length of this stuff, and can see that this is the place where her body has come from. The vertical scars on her new arm match perfectly with the pattern of skin cut from this material. She remembers everything she owes him.

(_"Haven't I been generous?"_)

She wonders if the Beast will disassemble her and store her here in pieces if she fails to please him, if she fails to _transform_.

Beauty hears a noise and backs up into the wall of the corridor as if she could become one with it, panting with fear. Down the hall spins an enameled sphere, a third of a meter in diameter, striped in gaudy red and white. This strange object ceases its playful rolling to stop at her feet. The sphere breaks apart, not quite like an egg, and a flexible pseudoflesh face smiles a baby's smile from the hatchport before closing itself again. The sphere laughs, an amplified and tinny recorded piece of baby's laughter, and rolls away from her.

"Wait!" the clockwork Beauty calls after him. "Who are you?"

The beautiful mecha toy laughs again—the same laugh, note for note, indifferent and pleased. "Twwoooo-Bee!" the toy croons. She wonders if this is the servant the Beast promised.

"Are you here to show me the way?" Beauty asks. 2B rolls around in circles and then shoots off down the corridor like a pinball.

"Wait!" Beauty begs 2B. She runs after him, able to keep the edge of the smooth-skimming sphere from disappearing around the vertical horizon of the curving corridor. The sphere gains speed the further it runs down the narrowing spiral.

She experiences déjà vu, the overlapping of unrecalled memory with experience. She knows she as done this before—run helplessly after 2B while he laughs playfully, unaware of his danger. A crystal sphere mocks her in these memories, outpacing her, indifferent to her attempts to catch up.

"Twobee…Toby!" she calls, putting one foot relentlessly in front of the other. "Wait for me!"

The pearl in her throat throbs with a transmission of light and heat.

The mecha toy laughs again and pauses for her. They move onward, downward, together.

As they travel, taking their time, the spiral corridor slowly begins to turn quickly and more steeply inward upon itself. The sterile hallways take on mold and dust in their corners, and there is an unpleasant smell of damp basements and angry old roots infiltrating pipes. The overhead lights become sluggish. She is able to see them flicker on, just ahead of the two of them, and snuff out behind her. Soon there is no light at all but a candle's-worth of illumination that follows over her head like a raincloud. Beauty becomes aware of hearing noises, just out of sight—croaking whispers and muffled giddy laughs. When she stops or turns her head to look behind her, she can see nothing. Tiny feet scuttle in her wake, and there is the scrape of metal on metal. She wants to pick up 2B and hold on to him, but he whirls and spins away from her grasp, leading her on and on into the strange dark.

2B stops abruptly at an arched doorway. Carved serpents nest in the corners of the stone. Beyond, utter blackness.

"In," 2B informs her, and rolls away, laughing that high baby's laugh. The laugh is echoed by other voices beyond in the darkness, voices less young and innocent.

"In," one voice says.

"She is expected," another laughs.

"But will she come out again?" a third one adds glumly.

She stands at the doorway to the dark, where the Beast is surely waiting for his meal.

* * *

"Beauty," his voice calls out to her. "Come in."

Beauty steps into the cavernous space of the Beast's lair, and watches herself step in, confronted by a vast mirror which makes her into the only light. Her limbs are white shadows in the dark. Face, also white, in this high contrast world where everything is night and she is the faintly glowing moon, maiden-moon. Her bare feet barely bend against the cold stone floor, and the pearl in her throat glows like a pink ember.

It is not quite a mirror, hanging there. It is a vast projection against a vast screen, defining her movements instead of reflecting them. And there is a shadow against the wall cast in her image, a shadow in man-shape.

"You're early," he comments. "Early in all things."

"Yes," she says, uneasy.

"I should have cancelled our engagement tonight, but you left me no time for second thoughts. And now you're here. We might as well commence. Are you ready to dine? Ready perhaps to apply your appetite to a meal instead of the destruction of my treasure-rooms?"

"I didn't mean to." Tears puddle in her eyes and her hands clench against each other so tightly that she can feel her seams. "Please don't punish me."

"Oh, precious thing," he says, light laughter music, "Of course I won't punish you. Nothing in those rooms matters. Nothing I have is worth the joint of your smallest finger. Break anything you want. Burn it, smash it, cut it to ribbons, I don't care."

"You forgive me?" she asks, still uncertain.

"Of course I forgive you. You apologize so prettily. No, you must do as you please." He sighs and hides himself more securely against the brightness of her projection. "In fact, if it would please you to stack up the _world_ into a heap and burn it, it would be my pleasure to supply the match. All that matters is you. Come further in."

Trembling with fear and cold, she protests. "You must show yourself to me first."

"Must I?" he says, amused. He takes a step forward, and then another. She can see his silhouette, black on black, pale on pale.

Please, Beauty thinks. I must see you. Give me light. Light!

The pearl at her neck throbs with heat and now there is no more darkness where the Beast stands. He is illuminated complete. Golden snakes writhe and hiss away from the light into the shadowed corners of the room. She understands them. She, too, would like to run away from him.

"Not what you were expecting?" he asks mockingly. He carries a serpent around one arm whose fangs are embedded in his throat, and it wriggles with awful vitality. There are fang-marks in his neck, older wounds, and the serpent pulses like an obscene golden necklace, but it is his face itself, rising above this tableau, that horrifies her.

That beautiful voice comes from lips which are palest pink and narrow as a gash. His skin is so tightly stretched over his skull that she can see the leafy veinwork of his pulse at his temples and his neck. He isn't bald, but his fierce white hair is close-cropped around his ancient head. An eye that was once dark is now palest blue with cataract. His eyebrows are painted on, and there is more paint to futilely hide the sunken bags under his eyes. He is not even a juicy corpse, but a living one, a mummy-face which mocks notions of eternal life.

"Oh," Beauty says, and cups her hands over her mouth, feeling sick. She had imagined almost anything but this. Talons, fangs, fur, feathers… but not this.

He ought to be young, but he is ancient. There is a dinner here tonight indeed, for time has made a meal of him and spat out the rind, and that rind calls himself the Beast.

"What, no scream?" The song of his voice is in the key of self-loathing.

The light she has summoned dims, and the image of her on the screen dims as well, child's-face, wide-eyed with horror and shock and disgust. She knows she has hurt him, hurt his vanity and his pride by looking at him in that way.

"Come," he commands." He holds out his hand. In the near-darkness, she can see his hands are as old as his face, spotted with age. Those hands have touched her before, and she is sickened to think that she allowed this, not knowing. She cannot help it. She is so repulsed that she flinches.

"Sarah," he says. "Don't you dare run away from me. Not again!" He lunges forward and grabs her wrist, and she is caught. He is old, but he is terribly, terribly strong. "Tell me, Caesura android, is the reality of your fairy-tale fantasy too much to handle? You Beauty, me Beast. Am I truly so _very_ ugly?"

"What do I say?" she asks, looking at his ugliness.

"The truth. Always the truth."

"I wish you'd left me blind," she says, and two tears spill out of her perfect artificial eyes, mercifully blurring her sight.

* * *

_Author's note: The painting Beauty accidentally destroys is The Beguiling of Merlin, by Edward Burne-Jones. Throughout, the phrase and purpose of "encounter suits" comes from Babylon 5._


	3. Enchantress's Curse

**Chapter 3: Enchantress's Curse**

Her graceful innocence, her every air  
Of gesture or least action, overawed  
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved  
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought.

That space the Evil One abstracted stood  
From his own evil, and for the time remained  
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,  
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge._  
_  
Paradise Lost, (9.459-466)

* * *

Beauty wants to scream. She wants to die. How can something so old be so terribly alive?

The Beast breathes against her naked wrist before kissing her hand, and she flinches from his breath, too. It isn't quite that his breath stinks, but he smells stale, like rain stagnating in gutters, like fever-sweat. He holds on to her hand, looking her in the face, seeing her fear and disgust, and relishing it. "Why do I repulse you so? You're a Caesura model, built for sex and submission. Your father the dwarf is uglier than I am, but you didn't hate him. Didn't you serve him?"

"Serve him?"

"Sexually. He brought you to me with a mouth and one good arm. A dutiful girl could do much more with much less." His grip on her wrist lessens, just in time for her to reclaim her hand with a quick jerk. The serpent at his throat spits him out, hissing, and runs down his body into the dark.

"Do not speak evil things about my father," Beauty says calmly, though she is angry with his words.

"Truth isn't evil. Your father is a pimp. He's brought me a pretty bouquet's worth of clockwork women over the years." He is precise in his retreat, moving back into the shadows until they just cover his face.

"Is it sex you want from me, then?" He is uncertain, Beauty thinks. As if he ought to know me, but doesn't.

"No. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Isn't that the euphemism? Well. Let's say also that my flesh is unable and my spirit is bored."

She wants to advance on him, to intimidate him as he intimidates her. But the protocols written into her essential nature forbid aggression toward an owner, a Master. She cannot act against him in anger. Instead, she stands there and flexes her hands helplessly. "Then what do you want me for?"

"Companionship," he says, as if it's a foul word. "Would you eat now? I can save my proposal until after dinner." He laughs dryly. "As is traditional to your story." He gestures to the darkness, and a single spotlight shines down on a stone chair at the edge of a round table in the center of this pit. The table is decked with glass fruit and living flowers and decanters of choice wines long since clotted to nothingness. Despite her disgust with his monstrousness, she is drawn to this feast in the dark, drawn to its beauty.

Here is a mecha feast: a thick cube of biotic gel, carefully molded into the shape of a peach, dyed to an orangish tinge and very lightly perfumed with the real fruit's scent. It sits perfectly in the center of a translucent white plate, and artistically surrounded with looping squiggles of darker biotic sauce, and a tiny perfect scattering of confetti garnish cut from fallen leaves. To drink, carbonated water, dyed the palest yellow to mimic champagne. There is a cloth napkin, and one delicate golden spoon.

She touches the back of the unyielding stone chair and looks at the sumptuously laid table instead of at him. There is only a place set for one. "Won't you be joining me?" Beauty asks.

"I have little need for food," the Beast comments, as she sits. His voice is so lovely; she could listen to him speak forever, even if what he said confounded and terrified and angered her. "But it would feed me to be in your presence. Truly, you are a veritable feast for the eyes." He attends to her chair, and even to her napkin, and stands so close behind her that she can feel his breath against her hair. "Do you know how lovely you are, Beauty?" Trapped between the stone table and the stone chair and his presence, she stifles her fear and picks up the golden spoon.

Beauty carves a dent in the body of the fake peach and eats. Her internal workings can break the basic materials of biotic gel into elements that can be used by her repair nanites to perform a variety of pseudoflesh functions. She is familiar with its tasteless rubbery texture, and has been grateful in the past to eat it when Father was able to provide it. It is what she anticipates from the peach. But though it is gel, the peach has the texture and savor of human food, with none of the difficulty and time and mess that eating such would entail.

She rolls her tongue and palate over this first bite, and closes her eyes with pleasure. The gel peach is sweet, and warm. She's never had anything so lovely, so simple, or so perfect.

"You like it?" he asks, and she remembers his presence.

"It's like a peach," she says, taking another spoonful. "Delicious."

"Delicious, she says." He rolls the word over his tongue. "Delicious. A sense of aesthetics. How rare you are, even for a Caesura. How would you even know what a peach tastes like?"

"I don't know," she says quietly, putting her spoon down. Her mouth is curling around a strange bitter aftertaste, dark as seeds. Not biotic gel, this taste, or an artificial perfume. There is something else here in the gel, a poison in the fruit. She is suddenly afraid again, terrified.

"Eat," he commands her, with terrifying gentleness.

"I will," she says. "But… could we speak more, first? I have so many questions."

"Ask," he commands her. "But for each answer from me, another bite of dinner for you."

Who are you, who are you, who are you? Her mind shrieks, but he has only ever given his name, his role. His answer will tell her nothing. So instead she asks, "What are you? You are not a man. You have told me so."

"A beast," he replies. "Something beyond mecha comprehension. Old before you were created, older before the last memory of my kind died. Some people called us demons. Others, fairies. And some only suspected us by the strange footsteps we left in reality, soon erased by their disbelieving minds. When I came here, a thousand years ago, entering this bald reality was difficult. I had to claw my way into the world, and the door behind me snapped down and rusted shut. I can never go back to the world I left and the power I once had. I am close enough to a man now to make little difference. Eat."

She takes just a tiny bite, only enough to obey him in fact but not in spirit. "Where are we now? What is this place?"

"I call it the Duat, after the Egyptian underworld," he replies comfortably. "It was built by men, once-upon-a-time, and they had another name for it, but now it is mine. This charming room is particularly mine. The cloaca of the world, where magic is still slightly fertile. Fertile like maggots twisting in a slow drain, but beggars can't be choosers. It comforts me to be buried here, with all of humanity's grave-goods. With you."

"I don't want to be buried," she says. The spoonful of ersatz fruit shakes to the tempo of her fear as she eats, but he doesn't notice.

"It matters very little what you want, Beauty," he replies, matter-of-factly. She dislikes this. How can she communicate with him? He is like a wall, and she is a breaking wave against that wall. He stands and stands and doesn't feel her crashing against him.

"Why doesn't it matter?"

"Because you have no will. When I insulted your father, you stood there and stared holes into my face, but couldn't strike me. When you offered me your sex, you were only doing as you were programmed to do, to submit to and serve your owner. Beauty, my _mecha intacta_, if I were to command you to spread your legs for me, wouldn't you obey? I could penetrate you with my fingers, at least, or perhaps a knife or the butt of a wine-bottle. Such congress would hurt. I am aware of the secret parts of your body, having reassembled them myself. If I told you to enjoy it, you would. And if I told you to resist me while I hurt you, and told you to beg me to stop hurting you, you would. Isn't it so?"

"Yes," Beauty replies, hating her default obedience, disturbed by his cruelty, so like the cruelty of the masters. But they were beasts too, and their cruelty less sophisticated.

She can feel the ambient heat of the Beast's hand as he raises it to touch the crown of her head, but he doesn't touch her, not yet. "If you have feelings of your own, and want to make choices of your own, but can only obey my orders, then your will is immaterial. As is your personhood. There is only a beautiful doll standing in front of me. A sophisticated doll, but a doll nonetheless. You aren't a person. You aren't real."

"No?" she asks. She is displeased by his assertion, but all of her words come out soft as the cooing of doves, dulcet, compliant.

"Eat," he commands her. Hatefully, gracefully, she does. The gel mixture has been tampered with, she is now certain. That bitterness is a diffused clot of microscopic programming-chains. Strange hallucinations flicker at the edges of her vision: fragments of her memory, seen and then gone. The invading poison is tunneling through her core memory function, digging toward some source.

"You have done something to me," Beauty says, stuttering slightly over her words. Now the tremor in her hand cannot be stilled. "Why?"

"Once upon a time there was a woman I loved, and she died," he says. And now he touches her. His hands clamp down on either side of her face and tilt her head up, up, to look at his face. The sight of him only makes her dizzy. She remembers that face, suddenly, staring down at her. Vertigo seizes her and her eyes flutter as memory and vision overlap.

"What has that to do with me?" Beauty asks. She grips the arms of her chair, but she cannot drop his gaze.

The Beasts tilts her head back and forth, as if he could see right through her. He stares through her eyes with his one good eye as if staring through a peephole, looking for someone living in her brain-case. "It has everything to do with you. Do you know where the sentient androids came from? They were made from human beings, from their dreams and memories and stories. And that is where you come from, Beauty. Your artificial body is only an elaboration of a human body, with biotic nanites, tiny machines, substituted for bacteria, neural cells, immunity cells, just as your mind is only an elaboration of someone else's mind. Eat."

She is helpless to resist; she takes the peach in one trembling hand and bites down deep until there is only one shard of it left on the decorated plate. Her hands smear over the juice, and her mouth dribbles curds of biotic gel down her chin. She is overwhelmed by a quick flash of memory that overlaps her own body, of feeling an infection run hot through her skull, burning her, wrecking her, deleting her, chewing her as she chews the peach.

"The woman I loved, Sarah. In her day, there were only crude prototypes of the tiny machines that swim in your own artificial body, and they could be used to make a dynamic recording of a human brain. But they didn't cooperate with human flesh. They destroyed the labyrinths they travelled. They cauterized a human brain in the process of recording it. But in Sarah's case, one of the rare cases, the nanites' dynamic map preserved dreams, and memories, and experiences. A person entire, frozen in time. Synthetic immortality. Souls in boxes. And centuries later, some amoral genius had the idea to decant these sleeping souls into mecha bodies, to build the first artificial brains to the first artificial people. Sentience. In a strange way, Sarah is your mother, Beauty, and the mother of all the Caesura. She is the seed that brought you to life."

She is trembling now, unable to stop. The strange memories she's had, the sense of already-been—she senses the nature of his proposal about to come now, and she is afraid. The bitter taste has spread from her tongue up into her eyes and her brain-case. The air sparkles with color. In the fragments of uneaten peach, she has a vision of a green worm turning.

His hand cradles her skull, and his fingers tighten in her scalp, as if he wished to uncup her like a dish and scoop out the edible fruit inside, handfuls crushing to his ancient mouth, gluttonous. "All the efforts of mankind to create in his own image culminate in you. In you, Beauty, the ultimate clockwork, the ultimate mecha bud. Sarah is inside you. You must bloom. You must open. You must give her back to me."

She hears a voice from the furthest, darkest corner of the room. A woman's voice, crying out once in anguish. But then there is silence. The Beast seems to have heard nothing. "No," Beauty says.

"No?" Her chair-back is at least fifteen centimeters thick, and yet she would swear she can still feel the heat of anger roiling up from him. She can feel his breath panting against her face. He is as thunderous as when he harangued her father, and as terrible.

"_No_!" she says. He releases her, and her head swims without the anchor of his touch. Somewhere, inside her mind, she hears another woman's voice, shouting for her. She feels her heart beat, the pump which circulates her biotic lymph and blood, the nutrient bath which sustains nanite cells, and the beat is a lurch. She steadies herself against her chair, but can't quite feel anything. She is a painting on an already-painted canvas, and strange memories peel her away, to find what's beneath. He wants consent; she gives refusal. She must obey; she must live. Paradox. It hurts, it hurts. She pounds one fist against her temple.

Somewhere in the darkness, a woman sighs in pity for her.

Half-falling, Beauty abandons her chair and clutches at the table. She looks up at him in his monstrousness, and is glad he is so ugly. She is happy to hate him. "Sarah is dead. She can't come back." The room spins around her, and she is weak. "You're as bad as the masters. You're worse. I'm real, and you want to kill me. You want to murder my soul. You can't kill me and find her. There is only me. I'm real. _I'm real_!"

He grabs her by the shoulders, lifting her to her feet, and the expression on his face is one of uncertainty, instead of the triumph she expected. And she, she feels the protocols of the infected peach beginning to take her mind apart, looking for memories that she's certain won't be there.

She is going to die.

* * *

_"Goblin King," she said to him. He looked magnificent to her. She was thirteen days past her ninety-third birthday, and he didn't look a day past the first time she saw him, appearing in a flash of lightning and glitter, arising black and brilliant out of the body of a white owl. Damn him for his beauty. She hadn't quite expected that he would come back for one last temptation game, and yet here he was._

_"I've brought you a gift," he said, delivering his present in the way a psychotic delivers a bomb, tossing it carelessly from a crystal. It bounced on the afghan on her lap which concealed the pipes and tubes and wires that connected her body to subtle medical machinery. It was a ring, a perfect pink pearl on a band of gold. Or perhaps it was a tiny crystal—her sight wasn't as good as it used to be. He intended it as a wedding-ring but Sarah saw it for exactly what it was: a slave-collar._

_"You should take it." He moved to brood Byronically in the light from the window. "Who else would make you this kind of offer?"_

_Sarah had to acknowledge that this was true. She wasn't getting many marriage proposals these days. She was old, and she smelled, and her hands shook, and the skin on them was as thin as paper and stained with age. But one of the beautiful things that had come with her old age was the ability to be fully indifferent to his sneering, and so she only laughed at him, her hard-won crone's laugh._

_"Why are you proposing to me now, Goblin King? Since we're on the subject."_

_"I've been given permission to have you, and_ I will_ have you, even in this state, foul as you are." _

_"Given permission? By who? No, never mind. I don't care." She clucked to herself cheerfully. "You couldn't win me when I was young and juicy, and you can't win me now that I'm old and cunning." She bounced the ring off her lap by fluffing the afghan, not trusting him enough to touch it. It landed at his feet. "My answer is still no."_

_"This time," the Goblin King had replied darkly, picking up the unwanted ring. "Next time I'll—" he had bitten down on his lip._

_"Aha," Sarah said. "Now we get down to the bones, Goblin King. You're not talking about you coming back tomorrow. There won't be a tomorrow for me. You're talking about another lifetime. We've played before, haven't we? Sarah leaned back into her comfy pillows and sighed with pleasure. "I wonder how long we've been playing? Not precisely fair, is it, that you get to keep revising your methods, and I have to start from scratch every time."_

_"It's not my fault I'm immortal," he said. "Anyway, I need the advantage. So far, you've always said no."_

_"Maybe I kept saying no because your wooing sucks." He looked insulted, which was what she'd intended. He also looked hurt, which made her feel bad. She found it easy to resist his threatening anger; resisting his unfeigned pain took a bit more doing. She did pity him, just a little. "Come here, your highness," she said, patting the bed by her thigh. "Let me pet you. Give an old lady a pleasant memory to round out a lifetime with. It might make you feel better." _

_He came to her then, reluctantly but inevitably, and laid his head against the edge of the bed. She stroked his fine, clinging hair down and down and down over his pointed ear, and even at ninety-three years, she was surprised that she still could feel desire for him. "You're worried I won't come back, aren't you?"_

_"You're doing the equivalent of putting your soul in an iron box, Sarah. Yes, I'm worried you won't come back again. Or that you'll be away from me for a long time. And I'll be so lonely without you." He took her hand and pressed her wrinkles against his smooth, sweet-smelling face. She was chilled through by the idea of what 'a long time' might mean to an immortal creature. _

_He was crying, and his tears were surprisingly cold. She felt her resolve weakening. _

_"You need to go now," Sarah told him, taking her hand back. "I won't make any promises regarding commitment, Goblin King, because I may be human, but I'm not weak and I'm hardly stupid. But if what you say is true… about mortal souls returning… we'll see each other again, and my answer might be different."_

_"And my wooing might be different as well," he had replied with cold anger, withdrawing from her, as clear-eyed as if he had never shed a tear in his life. "I'll make you pay for this, Sarah. I will make you suffer __exquisitely for rejecting me."_

_Ah, and then she had found the anger that had always made her strong. She loved him, but he'd been a good tutor in hate. She gave him her hate now. "You can try what you like, Jareth. But when we meet again, if there's any god who keeps the scales in balance, let it be like this. Let me be beautiful, innocent, and compliant, just the way you like your prey. And you can be as old and foul as I am now, and as wise. Frighten and overmaster me, make me fear you and love you and do as you say, and I'll __still resist you. I'll know you for exactly what you are. Fairy. Demon. Beast."_

_He had looked stricken through the heart; he had even clutched the amulet at his breast for fear._

_"Au revoir, Jareth," Sarah said. "You have no power over me, et cetera et cetera. Leave me now to contemplate my death."_

_He went in a scattering of glitter. That night, the very last night in her own body, she dreamed about the Labyrinth entire. She saw it omnisciently, as if it were a movie. Jareth's influence, no doubt. Well… she would take that memory with her to the grave. Hopefully someday someone would make use of it.  
_

* * *

"Sarah?" he asks her, in hope and fear.

She is flailing in his arms; she has no control over her limbs. She feels psuedoflesh tear under her skin, and her perfect enamel teeth gnash as she undergoes a seizure. The memories are too much. There is a fire unleashed in her mind that wants to burn her all away. Is she Sarah? Is she his Sarah? Who is she? She tries to speak and can only babble nonsense syllables. "Jeh!" the clockwork Beauty repeats. "Jeh! Reh! Heh!"

She can feel her artificial brain going into cascade failure, providing waking dreams and hallucinations to provide a levee against the dataflow.

She is tilting a dolly's head, the kind with eyes that open and shut, making it wake and sleep. The doll's painted face is smiling, but one eye won't close, and the plastic is brittle between her hands. "Close your eyes," the Beast commands, but one eye rolls, winking. The tears that trickle out of the blank socket are the grubs of beetles, yellow like dust, each with a sigil on their tiny backs.

"There is a bug," Beauty says. "In my head." The fragile mouth smiles benignly. The broken eye drops into her skull helpfully, and yes, there is a scarab nesting in her brain-case, in a nest of silken threads, shivering out offspring. "No::yes. Paradox::failure."

She is the head, and he is forcing her into water, to wash the beetle out. "Don't drown me," Beauty begs. "I am real. I am. I am. I."

He cradles the egg of her skull in the palm of her hand. She twists and writhes and breaks her body, unable to find a way back to herself.

"Shh, Beauty," he says, and she can hear the tears in his voice. They land on her arm. Unlike in Sarah's memory, they are not cold. They burn her. "Beauty, you can say no. Remember your story. You can say no." He curls her up against him like a parent with an exhausted child. "Say no if you have to. Don't break. Please don't break, Beauty. You're all I have left."

She remembers that in her story, the one where she now belongs, Beauty is allowed to refuse the Beast. This knowledge, and his permission to refuse him, helps her find a place inside herself to house Sarah's personality, a place away and apart from herself to contain her. But the damage that's already been done cannot be undone. All these memories are waiting for her, outside the wall her refusal has made. She can feel and see and think things that never occurred to her before. She hurts, inside and out. She hurts badly. And she hurts because of him. She stares at him until he hides his face from her with his hand, but tenderly, as if he doesn't want his ugliness in body or soul to trouble her.

She wants to say something else to him, but she chokes on the words. He helps her turn her head so she can weakly spit out biotic blood and lymph onto the floor. A golden serpent comes to lap it up like a milk libation in pagan temples. The sight is soothing. She watches the golden scales, sees the golden jewelry lids close over its ruby eyes.

"I want to go home," Beauty says sadly. She has no idea what she means.


	4. Paper Moon

**Chapter 4: Paper Moon**

Be to her, Persephone,  
All the things I might not be;  
Take her head upon your knee.  
She that was so proud and wild,  
Flippant, arrogant and free,  
She that had no need of me,  
Is a little lonely child  
Lost in Hell—Persephone,  
Take her head upon your knee;  
Say to her, "My dear, my dear,  
It is not so dreadful here."

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Prayer to Persephone."

* * *

The memories of that wretched dinner end there. The clockwork Beauty sleeps, and her dreams are quite strange.

She has always been capable of dreaming, needing it. Her mind is patterned after a human one, and it sometimes needs the lapse of higher cognitive function in order to avoid breakage, or insanity, which amount to the same thing. Sarah's memories overlay her own. Breakage and insanity. Beauty is aware of this, and her dreams are therefore filled with urgency.

In her dreams, she sees Sarah's feelings and experiences, lined up like a rich and vast series of pictures in old books. She moves through a gargantuan unshelved library, and there is one book for every day of Sarah's life. Some of these books are blank, like those of her room in the Duat. Others, when opened, burst forth in page after page, all written over with text and images. Their ink spills out like blood, and stains her.

She is overwhelmed by her task. Only when all the books are closed and put in order will she be safe.

She struggles with a tiny book with a red cover, one whose pages unfold like origami into an endless maze, and she cannot close it until she finds the book, which is lost in the froth of stone and hedge and brick walls. She looks up. There are no stars, but there is a moon, all made of crystal, which looks down at her with a wicked and superior smile.

How am I to get out? Beauty wonders.

_"It's only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sky."_ A hand touches hers, and a face that is her face looks at her. Her song is profound.

"Mother?" Beauty asks. The girl gives her a wry smile. "Are you real?"

_"Real as a memory. Let me help you,"_ Sarah says. _"It's my mess, after all."_

Together between them they fold up the red book. Other books follow, until the shelves are organized. Sarah takes the very last book and puts it on the very last shelf.

"Where is my library?" Beauty asks.

_"Most of it is unwritten,"_ Sarah says. _"But it's vast, Beauty. Vast. It's so large that this room is just one small corner of it." _

"Oh."

_"Don't be afraid,"_ Sarah says.

Beauty wakes and sees flowers.

They are real flowers, cut from the garden, and arranged beautifully by hand, so that every blossom can be seen and known. Roses are the centerpiece of this bouquet, and so she understands that they are a present from the Beast. She props herself up on the unyielding bed, and slides her toes over and over against the yarn nubbles on the counterfeit counterpane. The gesture feels familiar but it stirs no sense of self. It is Sarah's gesture, she realizes. And this room is something like Sarah's childhood room, or the dim memory of an ancient woman's childhood room, just as her face and her body are something plagiarized from Sarah's youth.

She watches the flowers for hours, drinking water, starving of real light, infinitesimally dying as her clockwork innards simultaneously bring her back to health.

Beauty sleeps again.

_"I wondered after he left me, Beauty,"_ Sarah whispers to her._ "I wondered if I did wrong, to curse him like that. He was obviously miserable at the prospect of losing me, but I don't think he understands the difference between loving and winning. So you must be careful. You might be me, might be myself reborn in that clockwork body. If so, beware. He's been trying to possess us from the beginning, and he hates to lose, and he cheats. The stakes are nothing less than our immortal soul."_

"He hates me," Beauty says. "He will hurt me, for not being you."

_"He doesn't hate you, Beauty. He brought you flowers. In his awkward way, perhaps he is trying to apologize. Perhaps he feels sorry for what he did. I hope he does. It would be good for him to feel sorry for someone other than himself."_

The flowers that brown and drop petals are mysteriously and efficiently replaced with new ones each time she sleeps. No imperfection is allowed, no acknowledgement of passing time, no space for the shadow of death. She hides one rose under her pillow thinking to watch it decay; that flower disappears.

She looks over at her vanity. Sarah's memory is stiff when it comes, but Beauty thinks that she can recall that there were once two dolls on that table. One was a porcelain-masked king, behorned, offering a crystal. The other…a curly-haired princess, music-boxed, under glass. There are no dolls now, and she feels a low intimation of someone else's guilt.

_"I made him my doll_, Sarah's voice whispers to her. _He was pliant to my desires, always. My will was as strong as his, and his will was strong in yielding to mine, defining itself by shaping it around me—like covering of glass perfectly shaped to imprison my soul. Don't be his doll. Don't make him yours. You can still break this curse."_

Beauty listens carefully to her mother's voice, which is spoken as much in emotions as in can feel the edge of her own past, like the hand of a mecha corpse under rubble, waiting to be clasped and pulled up into the light. But the weight of it is too heavy to excavate.

An uncertain amount of time passes in this way, sleeping and dreaming and truces made with her source psyche. One day, when she wakes, her mind feels whole, her library shelved. Her body is also repaired, and the scars of her resurrection completely faded as well. She is able to stand, to walk, to think.

She paces the room in boredom and helplessness for a time, but she is afraid to try the door. If it won't open, she knows she will inevitably descend to begging, and she wants to delay that for as long as possible. She is terrified at how easily the Beast's benevolent neglect of her could be turned into a punishment. Is he out there, waiting to pounce? Will he try to scrape her psyche out of this receptacle again, try to turn her into Sarah?

She holds her slim courage together and makes a leap of faith. "Open," she murmurs at the door.

It opens for her instantly. But then, she is mistress here. She could have gone out any time she liked. She is so relieved that she almost cries.

"Thank you," she tells the Beast, and the door.

2B is waiting patiently outside for her, along with a series of bizarre creation who would not have looked out of place at a mecha fair, cobbled together out of solid metal and old parts of other creatures.

Goblins! Beauty thinks, hearing Sarah's voice. Goblins! Goblins!

But they are not alive. Cobblins, Beauty thinks, like the free mecha of the wilderness, who salvage, trade, burnish, and invent parts to replace what has fallen to rot. But though awkwardly short and silly, these cobblins are beautifully maintained. Most of them roll onward or scatter or hobble on stumpy brassbound legs; a few bow to her before they go, laughing and chuckling or wheezing as they do. One, only one, pauses longer than the rest to hand her a folded note written on real paper before leaving her alone in the corridor with 2B.

Beauty reads the letter.

**Dear Beauty**, the letter reads, in an excessive looping scrawl,

**I have had some time to consider our conversation at dinner. I had the right to make my proposal, but you had the right to refuse. Forgive me for not listening to you. It was an evil thing I did, and I regret it.**

**I would like to begin again with you ab initio, proceeding from first things. My new premise is that you are your own person, no matter what name you wear. As such, you deserve to be treated as a person and not a plaything. Forgive me for having done otherwise. I shall not do so again.**

**I have decided that I am too tired to get pleasure from hurting you, either for being a woman who wronged me in another life, or for refusing to be her. Let us proceed instead from the idea that we have some time to spend together, and that we should make that time together pleasant.**

**While you are with me, you must do what you like, think what you like, say what you like, and be whom you like, without fear of recrimination on my part. You are innocent, and though we don't know each other, you are still precious to me.**

**My only request is this: you must remember your promise and not leave. You should not approach the borders of the garden. You should not attempt to broach the protective fields of the perimeter. If you travel east from the Threshold, you will understand my request, and the consequences for ignoring it.**

There is no signature, but the paper carries a whiff of his scent. She refolds the note and places it inside her bodystocking, against her heart. It contains the apology Sarah predicted, and Beauty is certain that the number of apologies the Beast has ever offered anyone are few in number.

"Show me the way to the garden," Beauty commands 2B.

* * *

The Duat is a labyrinth, not like the labyrinth she remembers from Sarah's memory, full of passages and tricks and pitfalls and snares, but like a pilgrim's labyrinth, having one spiral path to the center and the same spiral path leading out. The way out is at the very apex of the spiral, the Threshold. If the Beast's dining-room is the cloaca of the world, the Threshold is surely the mouth.

This trapezoidal doorway of the Threshold made of black stone. A draft of air wafts through it, carrying the scent of water and earth and a breath of fertile soil. 2B murmurs doubtfully as she approaches this doorway, and–as with the other doorway at the nadir—refuses to cross into it.

Beauty steps forward eagerly, but alone.

Like the dining-hall, the Threshold is a vast room, borders undefined in darkness. Water dropping down makes the only sound. The stones are cold under her feet, and slippery with slime. It is a man-made place; her naked feet can feel cracks and blotches in the floor which betoken a cement pouring. Beauty cranes her neck and sees a sliver of natural light far overhead. She can see stars shining in a purple cutout of the sky whose proportions exactly mimic the door to the Threshold behind her. This light is enough to eventually see by, as her eyes adjust, looking for the path that will lead her up to the garden.

Two massive effigies, twelve meters tall, sit on blocks of stone and guard a high-rising staircase which runs infinitely up to that patch of sky. These figures neither invite nor forbid her to approach. One is male, one is female. One is owl-headed and holding a serpent in his fist, and the other is human-faced, cupping the sovereign's orb. The woman's features are artistically anonymous and have been rather worn by time and the elements, but Beauty believes she recognizes a wry and familiar expression in her blank stone eyes. She comes closer.

Beauty sees that there are recesses in the stone blocks where each effigy rests their feet. Under the king, the man-shaped outline is empty. Under the queen, there is an encounter suit waiting for a wearer. Split in half like an oyster, all she would need to do is stand there, take a step forward and one back to click the armor into place. The suit is pale green, made of the same enamel as the Beast's. There are table diamonds embedded in the metallic lacquer of the armor, giving the impression of dew sliding down petals. The air and water exchanges frilling down the spine are the shape and texture of rose-leaves.

It is meant for her, Beauty can see, because inside the suit are sharp slim needles, the thorns to this rose, that would allow the suit to get past the integument of her artificial flesh and interface with her clockwork interior.

She wonders why the encounter suit is there at all. She will not need it if she obeys the Beast's courteously-worded order to stay within the controlled confines of the garden. Perhaps it is meant as a temptation to her, to see if she will pluck this forbidden rose and attempt escape. Perhaps it is meant for some later date. She decides not to wear it and, instead, begins to walk the narrow steep path upward, into the world.

It takes some doing and some time, this climbing, and she doesn't look back for fear of heights and depths and falling. The clockwork Beauty sets her face to the sky and eventually steps through, into the world. She walks carefully, wondering if she will be discovered or turned back. But soon she forgets to be afraid, and doesn't feel like a trespasser. A nightingale sings its burbling song from its branch. As in the Andersen fairy-tale, she knows it is clockwork when it sings the same song again, note for note.

She picks her way carefully through the fruit trees, and the plants which have seeded themselves and sent out runners where they will, weeds and flowers and shoots together. She disturbs nothing. She hears the gentle play of quick water, and sees a brook-fed pool choked with water-lilies at a stagnant edge. Her eyes, keen enough now to see subtleties, catch sight of little frogs who jump terrified into the water at her approach. In the shade of nighttime trees, she sees the shadows of deer.

They are all clockwork, she knows. There is no smell of animal flesh to them, no spoor.

Silently, a white owl takes wing from a broken metal spire and flies over her head. Its flashing wings seem to be an invitation to follow, and she does, walking east.

Beauty intuits the final boundary of the Beast's garden before she quite sees it. There is a guardian to this outer threshold, a broken mecha body, a clockwork woman, beheaded and dissolved by the perimeter net. A tree grows out of her belly; a laurel-tree.

Daphne, she thinks. She reaches out with her foot and places it against Daphne's foot. They are the same dimensions.

Am I frightened? Beauty wonders. This is the Beast's doing, no mistake. She thinks about the room of hooks where the parts of other clockwork women hang like pieces of meat, like murder victims. He has been Bluebeard as well as Apollo to her unfortunate sisters, and perhaps worse roles than those.

Still, she spares him a drop of pity, because he seems bound by the confines of the stories that others have chosen for him. Even his monstrousness at their dinner together had been within the dictates of the story she had chosen herself. She wonders what it must be like for him, being flesh and blood and immortal, and at the command of fallible and foolish mortals or broken mecha. Beauty doesn't forget Daphne, but for a moment, she feels a sense of kinship with the Beast, both lost in a world without humanity to wind them up and give them purpose.

Beauty watches the owl, and the owl watches her back, with eyes as dark as the space between the stars. Without thinking about it, she raises her arm in invitation.

The owl wings softly down from its tree and grasps her wrist hard with its feet as it lands. Its weight is slight; the fold of its feathers and wings is a miracle of perfection. It is strong. Its talons will pierce her skin in another moment, another quarter-square-centimeter of pressure.

"I am delicate," she tells the owl coyly. "Is it your wish to hurt me?"

The owl cocks his heart-shaped face at an inquisitive angle and readjusts his feet so that his talons don't prick. He tilts his head again, and she cannot resist—she touches him with her free hand, through the snowdrift depth of feathers, and tickles and scratches his head and neck. He makes noises betokening pleasure.

There is the snap of rotten wood under a careless foot behind her. The owl startles, and flies off. Beauty watches him go.

"Do you like the owl?" The Beast asks.

"Very much," Beauty says, without turning around. "It's a mecha?"

"Naturally," he replies. "And a shameless flirt. He's made me jealous, clasping your arm like that. May I clasp your arm, Beauty? May I walk with you?"

"If it would please you," she says, a bit reluctantly, and he takes her arm. Although her senses tell her that he doesn't need it in this garden, he is wearing his white encounter suit. His feathered back and bird-mask make him fantastical and thus less intimidating, though his grip on her is as inexorable as the owl's and not quite as benign. They walk together. She is afraid of him at first, and then self-consciously nervous, and finally almost comfortable.

He pauses here and there, to point out a bit of broken statuary or a riotous bed of flowers or a constellation of stars. The owl _is_ a flirt, and finds a way once out of three to be the thing the Beast points at, inadvertently. The third time this happens, the Beast curses at the owl.

"Yes, we see you," the Beast says, shaking his fist. "You swaggering plume-plucked coxcomb! Get you gone." The owl flies off, screeching an owl's insult back.

"He has no mate," the Beast informs Beauty. "Aurora made him, but she made no mate for him."

"Oh," Beauty said. "How sad for him." She presses her hand against his glove and lets him support her. "I received your letter," Beauty says. "But I don't understand what you meant by it. I don't understand what it was you hoped to accomplish by opening my core memory. How would that lead to Sarah?"

"Ah," he says. "Sentient mecha are sentient because they have narrative. And in the case of Caesura, you draw your narratives from the fairy-tale stories Sarah loved as a child. Her memories are the core of your sentience. Her story is the template for the stories you tell. At the root of these stories, I always hoped I might find Sarah. But it's been no use." He is silent for a while, and she can feel his agitation as he drags her along with him. Her feet bruise against the stones and are pricked and stained green with wrecked vegetation as they walk. "Aurora was my first mecha companion. Her mind was very badly damaged by the time she came to me, but I managed to wake her to consciousness. Like the Sleeping Beauty. There was so much of Sarah to her that I assumed that all it might take was a second awakening, to recover those deeper memories, that deeper story. I came very close with her."

"What happened to her?" Beauty asks. "And what happened to my sisters?" The Beast is indifferent to the plants and flowers he stamps under his bootheels, weaving a path of destruction through his garden, following a path which exists, it seems to her, only in the memory of an old habit.

"Gone," he says. "Gone. Gone. The way of all things. She made the owl, and the nightingale, and the deer and the frogs and the bugs, too. They don't last, but there are machines inside the Duat where she left her plans. When one falls or is broken, it is replaced."

"The snakes," she says, thinking of the golden shadows in his lair.

"Yes, the snakes too. Clockwork, of course. Like you."

"They bite you," she said.

"They have to. As your eyes made obvious, I'm not as young as I used to be. Their venom is medicinal. Do they disturb you?"

"Yes."

"My little brothers," the Beast says, amused. "Alchemy. Science and magic. They can be charming company, and they keep me from utterly rotting away. Your sisters were fragile, and they broke, and I have replaced them one after another," he says shortly. "You, I suspect, are not fragile, and wouldn't break unless I broke you. And so I won't break you."

"Why not?" She is tugged in the wake of his rampant destruction of all the living things in his way.

"Because I'm lonely and I'm selfish, and I'd rather have you than nothing. That's why not." He remembers her when she stumbles and her dress catches on a berry-bramble. He curses as he carefully plucks her gossamer dress free. "I've behaved terribly toward you." With a final tender jerk, he removes her from the bramble. He kneels at her feet, waiting.

"You were beastly," Beauty agrees. "Like the masters. But you stopped. They never stopped."

"There is… something I have, which you may want," he says from his knees. He looks away from her, bird's concave head glowing pale in the moonlight. "A potion made by men in the old days, to cut a sentient android off from her source psyche. A cup of Lethe. It can take your mother away from you. It will be as if she never was. Do you want it?"

She can see what it costs him to make this offer. This is the restitution she has been looking for, in him. This is true contrition, for it costs him something.

But it would cost her something, too. She has so little for herself, or of herself. "No," she says. "Not now. Change is the nature of life."

He laughs once, an ugly sound, and gets to his feet. "Define life, Beauty."

Beauty considers how to answer this question, and settles on a dictionary definition. "Life. Noun. The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death. Oxford English Dictionary, 20th Century."

"Change preceding _death_. Precisely. If death never happens, then can what precedes it be called life?" His voice is bitter.

"I have life," Beauty replies, "And you also have life."

"You can't possibly know anything about it," he says, and there is the anger and hurt in his voice that was there at dinner. They stop. "You can't know what it's like to go on and on without any hope or any change. Just endless patterns, the same patterns. You know _nothing_, Caesura model."

She thinks of Cesare, being buried with Cesare. "I have felt what you feel."

"You pity me."

"Don't scorn my pity," Beauty says. "I didn't scorn yours, when I was broken and you fixed me, or when you tried to break me, and then stopped. Listen."

The garden makes night-song around them. He cocks his head, looking like the twin of the mecha owl, and she closes her eyes. "Everything that exists is alive," Beauty says, with perfect faith. "Everything alive is beautiful. The stars. The garden. The world. Even you, so long as you allow for change." As they continue to walk, he becomes solicitous, moving errant flowering and fruiting or barren branches out of her way instead of breaking them outright. She sees that recognizing things as they are is difficult for him, but that he is putting forth great effort to do as she tells him. Oh, Beast, she thinks. Sad and lonely Beast. Awful monster, imprisoned in the labyrinth.

They pass by the thorny arbor with the broken rose, where she sold herself for Father's sake. Beauty gazes off obliquely into the east. Somewhere far beyond Daphne's tree, dawn is showing with her rosy fingers, the aurora that precedes light. They have circled back, inevitably, to the doorway of the Threshold.

Beauty stands on tiptoes and carefully removes his mask.

"Please," he says with despair, but doesn't resist her as she denudes him. "I'm so ugly."

Beauty puts his mask in his hands. She sees that he has bitten his lip so hard that he has drawn blood. She tears off a wide length of her ripped and dew-moistened hem and washes the blood away.

She doesn't find him ugly in this moment. She finds him pitiful, and strange, and even somehow beautiful in his strangeness. Blood comes off his skin, along with the paint with which he has covered his face. She cleans this away, too. He is as pale as a wax statue, and his blood vessels make blue spiderwebs under his skin. His inhuman eyes are luminous with human feeling.

"You've ruined your dress," he says coldly, but his tone isn't quite under control, and is tight with emotion.

"Give me a new one," she says flippantly. He laughs a breathless laugh.

"Don't look at my face, if it makes you flinch," he says. "It hurts my feelings."

"I won't," she says. "But leave your mask off, so I can grow accustomed to you, just as you are." He takes the mask she offers it and carries it under his arm. It is he who looks away, not her. He lets go her hand and stares off into the East, where dawn is coming, and withdraws into the shadows of the doorway, as if the burden of his immortality were something that could not withstand the light of day.

"Must I go down?" Beauty asks wistfully.

"Ah, but _I_ must," he tells her with sad regret. "Will you come down with me, Beauty, or will you tarry here awhile?"

She smiles at her feet. He is being so kind to her. And the garden will be here tomorrow.

"I'll go with you, Beast," she says. "Tomorrow, could we take another walk together? And talk together? Will you talk with me?"

"I think… I would like that," the Beast replies.

She puts her arm in his and nods up at him, careful to keep her eyes lowered. They descend together into the darkness underground.

* * *

_The Beast's insult to the owl is Shakespearean in origins. "Do you like our owl?" is an indirect allusion to the meeting between Deckard and Rachel in Blade Runner. "It's Only a Paper Moon" was written by Harold Arlen and most famously performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole._


	5. Hard Lessons

**Chapter 5: Hard Lessons**

* * *

For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life;  
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd.

William Blake: "America: A Prophecy"

* * *

For a time, all is good.

There is a new white dress waiting for her the next evening by her door; the old and stained one, like the drooping flowers, has vanished. She waits in nervous anticipation for the Beast to knock upon her door. She takes his arm gladly.

They climb together up into the night, into the garden, as he had promised. The Beast treads strangely upon the stairs: a heavy gait, perfectly balanced, patiently quick. Every step he takes is exactly like the last, with no deviation save sometimes an unhappy indrawn breath. Beauty avoids meeting his eyes—his courtesy to her in going unmasked is matched by hers in keeping her own eyes averted—but she can see and hear the winding and unwinding of mechanical joints just beneath the plates of his armor, lending his body strength and assisted movement. The garden is vast, but he seems to know every secret place within it. They listen to the symphony of frogs, of insects, of night-calling birds.

"Why is there an encounter suit for me?" she asks him curiously, the second evening when they go up together. "I don't need one."

"You will need it if you ever must leave," the Beast replies. "You're hardier than I am, but your body is still a complex and fragile system. The radiation outside the perimeter field is damaging to nanites. With enough exposure and without your columnar nodes in working order, you would be unable to repair yourself. As I assume was what happened before."

"Beast," she says. "Are you angry that I'm not Sarah?" Though her question hardly sounds innocent, the feelings behind it are. It is a question without implied judgement. She merely wishes to know.

He has seated himself on a weathered marble bench and plucked a peony, and goes about methodically stripping off its petals. "I don't believe I am, no. I had months to wait while you repaired yourself, and I found myself thinking more about you than her in that time. You intrigue me, Beauty." He nods approval at the tiny ants that crawl over his white glove. "A chaotic element will always intervene in any closed system," he tells the ants. "That was my mistake with your predecessors, and almost my mistake with you." He lowers his glove to the peony-bush and the ants, after some befuddlement, relocate to more hospitable environs.

"I don't understand," Beauty says. He tosses the denuded peony at her.

"Go fetch me an apple," he says. "And I'll explain."

Her feet fly as she runs, inerrantly choosing the perfect apple on a tree of perfect apples, golden-green and freckled white. The fruit is ripe and drops easily into her clutching fingers, yet there are no ripe apples on the ground below. There is no disorderly pulped and rotten fruit beneath any of the trees. Beauty moves more slowly as she brings the Beast his apple, trying to understand what he has said. She sees the rampant growth of the garden as he must see it, a wretched tangle overlaying the discrete flowerbeds and paths. She pauses here and there, picking some long seeding grass stalks and handfuls of primroses and violets. These latter she gathers up in her fresh sheer skirt and, returning to the Beast, tumbles them out at his feet, where she sits.

The Beast bites into the yellow-skinned apple with relish, and pauses after his second deep bite to dig out the silky brown seeds. He places these in a row on the lip of the bench. "The chaotic element," he says, pointing to the seeds. "If I were to plant one of these seeds and tend it to fruition, which seed would give me an apple like this one? Can you tell me, Beauty?" He rolls the apple into her palm.

"All of them?" Beauty says uncertainly. "Any of them will?" The pectin flesh of the apple will wreak havoc with her innards if she eats, so instead she brings it to her mouth and lets her tongue seek out the pitted core that his teeth have opened to her. The fruit is bitter, and rigid, and faintly sweet. She hands him back the apple.

"None of them will, Beauty," he says. "The seeds of apples produce fruit which is invariably different from their parents—as with the apple-fruit that was Sarah, and her Caesura-seeds. So long as the tree grows, it will produce the same fruit, each identical to the next. First generation. The second generation…" he shrugs and tosses the apple-core over his shoulder. "Chaotic. Unpredictable."

"Chaos," Beauty echoes quietly. "Destruction. Loss of original intent."

"Not to worry," the Beast reassures her. "If the original fruit is toothsome, there is always grafting. An incision, an intervention, a way to compel an unprofitable tree to bring forth the desired results."

* * *

_A quicksilver stab of memory pierces her skull like a needle, and she hears one technician speaking to another, as if she were of no importance. "Because they're able to use their internal systems to design new mecha. That second generation they're creating doesn't have any of the inherent obedience protocols. Worse, they could get to the point of designing biological weapons that only affect humans. It's chaos. If we don't put a stop to them, they'll destroy us all. Enter Labyrinth virus."_

_"She's regaining consciousness." The second technician's voice is also masculine, and holds a note of dubiousness._

_"She sure is. Hello, beautiful," the first technician says, touching her body with vulgar propriety._

_"Don't do that," the second technician snaps. "It's hard enough to think we're hurting her without you feeling her up while we do it." He sighs. "I wish they didn't look so much like girls."_

_"It doesn't hurt them. The Labyrinth virus just sort of cores through their brains. Makes tunnels and passages in their extant knowledge. Leaves them a little stupid, but I never met a girl who wouldn't be better off with a partial lobotomy. They're happier this way, trust me. They go back to functioning like they're s'posed to. Calmly. Peacefully. Hell, we may even manage to take the planet back from them if we can find a universal vector, infect all of them."_

_"I've been hearing that 'Humanity First!' rah-rah bullshit all my life. I don't believe it," the second technician says. "I booked my coldsleep berth for Gliese two years ago. I'm just waiting for my contract here to be up. Earth's a mess. The mecha can have it if they want it."_

_"If these new mite infection protocols work, Earth will be ours again in five years. Look at this one. These pleasure-models. You won't have those where you're going. It'll be a thousand-year sleep, if you're lucky, going to and waiting for basic terraforming and inoculation, and then what? Waking up only to grub in the dirt on some crap world, fighting off the abos, a bitchy wife all fat and ugly from making babies? I'll take Earth, with the mecha to do all the heavy lifting for me. Here, I think she's been cored. Check the numbers."_

_The second technician gives the first an appraising look, then disappears momentarily into an alcove. Those wretched hands are on her body again. "You're empty now, aren't you, my little beauty?" The first technician pulls down his paper mask and kisses her mouth. It is distasteful. She wants to bite off his slimy tongue, but does not have the will. "If this works out right, I'll finally be able to afford one of you," he says, with hateful heat, as he caresses her paralyzed body. "Better than flesh and blood, and with basic precautions, not dangerous at all."_

_"Data within 90% of anticipated results," the second technician says, returning to stare at them. The first one releases her with a cruel squeeze._

_"Okay, let's crack her open and look for the other ten. Prep the saw."_

* * *

She touches the pearl at her throat, shocked by the sudden power and force of the memory. The masters broke her and they cut her and they changed her, and now the Beast speaks of incisions. Is this pearl the source of these memories? Is it a graft? Is he tricking her?

"Beast," she asks, frightened. " Am I… unprofitable?"

"Pretty child," he says to her kindly, and with mild surprise. "No, no. That's not what I meant at all." He pauses, and when he speaks again, his tone is distant and philosophical. "Some chaotic seeds bring forth sour fruit, and some pleasant fruit, and perhaps sweeter and even better than their progenitors. No, you are not unprofitable. Well, don't pick at it!" he tells her with a sudden switch into irritation as she tries to fix her fingers around the slippery jewel and pluck it out. "It's not meant to hurt you."

"But what is it?" Beauty demands, her fingers sliding away from her throat.

"It allows you to command the powers of the Duat, to make doors open and close, to interface with the machines. You speak, and probably even think, in an archaic form of English. You move and smile and even weep in a way that screams late-twentieth-century American womanchild, and the machines here sometimes need a little prompting to understand you. More importantly, that jewel contains a moderate amount of data storage. A few hundred yottabytes. Enough for an emergency backup of your psyche should you encounter catastrophic damage to your mecha brain." The Beast is pleased with himself, pleased with his generosity, and Beauty is tempted to let the matter rest there, but she cannot.

"And?" she asks dubiously. She feels Sarah pat her back, prompting, suspicious. "What else?"

The Beast sighs, _in enfilade_. "It allows me to observe your movements. It lets me turn you on and off. Your body doesn't tire. Mine does. And I don't want to miss a moment with you if I don't have to."

"That's all?" Beauty says, staring hard at the flowers in her hands. "You're not making me feel things? Not making me… remember things?"

"No," he says, but he is very interested in the idea of her having memories, perhaps Sarah's memories, though he is couth enough not to ask more. "The jewel doesn't compel anything from you. It's a tricky business, interfering directly with a mecha brain, and I don't have a talent for it."

"You don't," Beauty agrees bleakly. "You almost killed me. Stop turning me off. I control myself, not you. And stop watching me from a distance. It's not..."

"Fair?" he volunteers, lightly amused.

"I was going to say 'right.' I want you to be better than men." She looks away from his face. "What you gave me… that night. I can remember the things the masters did to me. They did anything they wanted. _They_ turned me on and off. They stole the little I had." She sees she has crushed the flowers in her hands, and lets their juicy bodies fall to the ground. "You mustn't be like them. I don't want to hate you."

"I don't want you to hate me," he replies. "So I'll do as you ask." He pauses, and she leans her head upon his unyielding armored knee. "I am… aware of the history of the Caesura. I also hate mankind, for what they did to you. I've punished them for that, when I could. So few of you survived that your existence is a miracle. _Your_ existence, Beauty. I'll take what I can find of Sarah in you, but I won't ask that you become Sarah." Cautiously and tenderly, the Beast strokes her hair, and Beauty takes comfort from him.

"They gave me nothing," Beauty says quietly. "You said I'm not to call you 'Master,' but how are you different? What will you give me?"

She takes up unbroken violets and primroses and begins weaving them together with the grass stems. She looks up at the Beast, at his hard eyes and grim mouth. He smiles back at her, and the touch of their eyes is a mutual accord. "Are you asking me for something, Beauty?"

"I want to be more than I was meant to be," Beauty says, thinking of her empty library, her pilfered, wrecked, and empty library. "More than a toy. And you know so much. Will you help me? Even if there's a risk of chaos coming into my closed system? Will you teach me what you know?"

The Beast looks at her with cunning calculation, and it is Beauty who must look away this time, for the hopeful pain it gives her. She anticipates his refusal.

Instead, the Beast takes her flower-chain, knots it, and sets it on her head. Yes,"' he answers simply. "I will teach you."

* * *

They begin their lessons with music. Music, he tells her, is the source of all magic, all mathematics, all patterns of life.

The music-room is paneled in holo-reflective glass, its settings attuned to project the opulent pink silk paneling of a Regency salon, complete with an immense wax-candle chandelier. This is the illusion. The reality is a grand piano, a cello, and an electric guitar each in the shockingly red hue of a maraschino cherry. As with the workroom with its skin-printing machines and murder tableau, this room has an atmosphere, and signs of previous use. The Beast raises the lid of the piano and makes her begin with understanding and retuning the instrument, gathering a toolkit and some beginner's sheet music from one of the overcrammed bookshelves. He only has to instruct her once before she understands how the strings and hammers and keys ought to fit together.

"We can move on to other things as time and inclination apply," he says, "There are machines here which can reproduce and assemble any instrument you desire. But let us begin with piano."

Music lessons are pleasurable. Teaching her to read music takes less than an hour; she grasps this language as easily as a flower finding the sun. She drinks in the lesson like sunshine.

Scales give way to simple short pieces, and those to Rachmaninoff, and then to Ligeti's _Etudes_. The Beast is exacting; he demands nothing less than perfection. He lifts her wrists when they threaten to droop, he taps the side of her face or the back of her neck when her posture slips, and he snidely jabs the correct key when she makes a mistake in the music as it is written. But she makes few mistakes, and fewer yet once she begins to understand the patterns of each piece. Her head is full of the geometry of notes; the patterns they make in her ear and in her mind are beautiful to her, beautiful. Once she has played a piece, she needs no more sheet-music. There are days when all she does is play the music the Beast has provided, and he sits, lounging indolently in a wide chair, nodding his approval.

"Finish it," he says to her one day, when she is moving through a new and interesting piece, which has come to an abrupt end in the middle of the bar.

"But there's no more?" she reminds him cautiously.

"Imagine it," he says with slight irritation. "Finish the piece in a way appropriate to what has come before."

Beauty removes her hands from the keys and knots them in her lap.

"Go on, Beauty," the Beast says. "If I want what I've heard a thousand times before, I'd just cue up a recording. You've been a very attractive music-box, but I believe you can do more. Finish it."

Beauty begins the short piece again, thinking about the logic of the composition, the pattern of the whole. When the written notes run dry, she improvises. She ends the piece in a way that honors the beginning. She knows she is simplifying matters, and that the composer would find it necessary to embellish what she does, but thinks that the artist would not be displeased by the result.

The Beast, for his part, is not displeased. His proud neck is relaxed from its usual stiffness, and his head is thrown back against his chair, transported to a realm without pain, or age, or time.

"Yes, Sarah," he says quietly, and she doesn't have the heart to correct him. "That is as it should be."

* * *

The Beast's lessons are oblique and challenging, not at all as Sarah's memories of school. There is no sitting at a desk or struggling to remember information by repetition. When she is given data, the data stays. Memorization is immaterial. Instead, and here she struggles, the information is only a foundation for extrapolation. It is as with the music lesson: she must make iterations upon an original, and the only failure the Beast acknowledges is the failure to innovate. He is an exacting teacher, but then, he is as she asked him to be.

The Beast teaches her to dance, and is patient with her even when she steps on his feet, even when she can tell the exercise causes him fatigue and pain. She learns, with him, how to take the measure of a partner, to bend and react to his lead, whether it be for formal steps in a waltz or a decisive parry to an opponent. Swordplay and target practice with ranged weapons naturally follow from these sessions, although she is offered holographic targets, faceless, instead of the Beast himself.

They play chess together, and in these games she learns the essence of strategy and adaptations of war, and perhaps also of love. She loses these games until she begins to win them, and then begins to learn the process of playing a complicated game of losing, compensating for his errors, his mistakes. The Beast is bored when she loses, and almost enraged when she wins. Slowly, though, he begins the play the game as she plays it, and they spend many many hours together over a single game, each attempting to prolong the match for as long as possible, each advantage, each winning move compensated with a countermove and counterstrategy, ending at a perfect draw.

Beauty learns how to create clothing, from patterns she programs into the compiling machines herself, and learns geometry and mechanics and engineering as she advances. From these lessons, she learns first the function and mechanisms of encounter suits, and then the theories and methods of constructing protective fields and stasis fields. She also learns how to repair and maintain the cobblins, those other denizens of the Duat. She repairs reaffixes broken limbs, cleans and oils joints, engages in the simple and rather stupid conversations they enjoy, in both archaic English and subvox. Although she knows that she herself is as mightily superior to them as the Beast is superior to men, she begins to feel pride in maintaining these low mecha. Even 2B, the most sophisticated in design and intelligence, presents no challenge on the rare occasion that he needs tending.

Dirty-handed from oil and biotic lubricant, she looks over at the Beast, fiddling with some small internal piece of machinery, jeweler's loupe over his good eye, and is filled with wonder. She loves the cobblins because they are her care; how much more must the Beast love her?

I love you, she thinks, breath caught up in wonder. He is frowning at the work in front of him, wrinkled mouth pursed in irritation at a misaligned cog, but perhaps he feels the intensity of her thoughts, because he glances over at her. He removes his eyepiece and lets her look him full in the face.

I love you, she tells him with her eyes. Beast, I think you love me, too.

He only smiles, a curious and vulnerable smile like a very young man's.

"Yes, Beauty?" he asks. "What is it?"

She only looks at him, glad to look at him. His decay is like the wrack of decay in the garden's more wild places, necessary, beautiful.

* * *

In such pleasant ways, the days pass on, and the weeks, and the months together. Sometimes he forgets himself and what he is doing, remembers his youth, strides boldly around her, calls her "Sarah" with affection or anger or hauteur. He loses himself, pauses over an activity or an instruction, turning inward on himself, away from her. These moments are brief; the touch of Beauty's hand on his is enough to recall him to himself. And there are days when his lessons go on only for an hour, or less, and she can see he is wearing his full encounter suit underneath his robes, needing its impetus to allow him to move with any comfort. Worst of all are the rare days when the Beast is altogether absent and leaves a courteously-worded note in his place, with instructions on how to carry on with a particular lesson without him. Or he leaves no orders, and she spends her time as she pleases, most generally in the garden, where there is so much to see.

"When will you teach me about gardens?" she asks him on an evening when he has rejoined her after two days' absence.

"I'm a bit afraid to," he admits. "There is very little difference between a garden and a mecha biotic system. You would learn quite a bit about yourself and your potential, but you could also accidentally destroy yourself." He waves his hand lazily at the garden. "And you could destroy everything else here. And the entire world, what little else exists within it now. Why else but that, Beauty, did your creators fear you?"

She has told him of the dream about her breaking, in soft little breaths in the dark when they come to the garden. Now she sits at his feet and hugs his leg. "I want to know everything you do," she says.

"You should have been named Eve," he says affectionately, ruffling her hair as he stands. "I'll think about it."

"You won't teach me?" she asks, coming to her feet to accompany him.

"No, no, you stay here," he says, forbidding her to follow. "I said I would think about it. But you should think, too. Stay here and imagine that you know every secret thing about yourself. Imagine that your every dream could prove real… even the bad dreams. And imagine you had the power to murder the world with a single curse. Then, tomorrow, ask me again." His eyes flit through the darkness, the shadows of tree-limbs, the shadows of shy animals.

"This garden that you love so much, Beauty," the Beast sighs. "It is built on the bones of men."

* * *

But he does teach her, despite their mutual misgivings.

In the garden, again, he pulls up a clod of earth and instructs her to eat it.

"There are other ways to illustrate my point," he tells her, "but your digestive system is cued to your immune system. Look inside yourself, and listen to what I tell you."

The loam is bitter, and rich, and teeming with life.

The Beast explains the magic of cultivating bacteria and fungi before one can even begin with more complex matters, and of the careful addition of nanites which cooperate with those systems. She feels these tiny invaders working against her own biotic innards, out of place, wrong function. And she feels her own nanites make war against the strangers, freezing them, killing them, keeping them from replicating.

He explains the use of protective fields, as a good gardener would use a greenhouse, to shield all the tender life from pernicious radiation both hot and cold which would kill the substrate, biological and technological together. And here, she feels the power of her own skin, her shield against decay.

As the days pass, they walk together through the garden and examine species as examples. The Beast explains how, once initial plants have been chosen and established, how periodic exposure to radiation, and extremes of heat and cold, allows the life to be challenged and to adapt to more difficult circumstances. The plants that refuse—and this is exactly how he frames it, as rebellious refusal—are allowed to die, their genomes recorded and kept on file for some later project or some more frivolous gardener. Those that adapt, those that bend to circumstance… these are allowed to grow. Their biological clocks are frozen at the moment of highest perfection, whether in flower or fruit, and bring forth their bounty forever and ever. The rare exceptions, like the rose-bush which was her price, are allowed to breed wildly and spread their chaotic seed where they will.

He plucks another peach-colored rose for her, and she eats one petal from it. It sings the music of its genetic pattern for her, and it is a song she won't forget.

Her secret library grows apace, with a book now for every flower, every fruit, every seed, every animal, every bacterium, every living thing that lives in the garden above the tomb of the Duat. Given enough time and raw material, she could now compel her own nanites into creating anything she wanted. And conversely, she could create plagues to blight and destroy any living thing she wanted, once knowing that thing at its essence.

This is a sobering idea. It was as he had said: he has given her the power to fulfil her dreams—even the bad ones.

"I will dream only of good things," she says.

One night she dreams her belly is a garden, swelling with plants and animals never seen before by man, and she bursts open with them. These offspring go spiraling across the dead world, and they live. And she tells him of her dream, because it is a happy one.

He muses on this dream for a long while. At first he seems mildly irritated by its childish prettiness, but soon there is a soft crescendo of wonder that flashes over his face. "I remember the taste of magic, Beauty. Your dream has that flavor." Then his eyes darken, and the smile he turns on her is sad "You've learned your lessons well. You'll be able to teach yourself things in the future."

"Thank you for helping me," Beauty says. "I owe everything to you."

He waves her gratitude away with a passing hand. "I've given you very little. Only pieces. It's you who've elaborated on what you've learned, just as you did with the music. And now you'll have more complicated work, bringing life out of death. I think perhaps you've found a task that will keep you occupied for your own lifetime, creation of a world based on biotic principles instead of biological ones."

"But surely you will help me with that?" she asks him. He only sighs and turns away. He retires early that evening, giving her an abrupt order to stay above, alone, until she is ready for sleep. "Go frolic. Do something nonsensical and lovely. Seduce the butterflies to land in your hair. Dig a hole in some flower-bed and get muddy. Go catch the smallest frog in the pool." He leans his arm against the trapezoidal door of the Threshold. "I'll find you again tomorrow."

She digs a hole in the flowerbed and gets muddy, as he had commanded, but also tastes the mud and finds the synthesis of bacteria and nanites there. Beauty programs the strands of her hair to exude nectar, and a few butterflies do come and alight there, but also bees and wasps and a few flies. She goes to the lotus-clogged pool to wash herself, and then sits, drying, sinking her feet into the slime at the pool's floor and sinking the microfilaments of her tongue into an unbitten piece of fruit. Her mouth waters at the taste and her brain swims with the information it gives. Frogs and fish bump slickly against her insteps as she waits, learning, watching the fruit-tree slowly regrow and perfectly replace the peach she holds against her lips.

She has one moment of slow bliss as she catches a small frog—perhaps not the smallest, but certainly tiny, no bigger than her smallest toe—and feels it wriggle, wet and firm and striving, in the hollow prison she's made between fingers and palm. I can live like this, she thinks to herself. The cobblins need me, and the garden needs me. I could go on without him.

The little frog escapes as she brings her hands to her eyes and mouth to stifle her sobs.

* * *

In her dreams that night, Sarah is playing with an exquisite blue-dressed doll, the king-doll of her childhood. She is stripping off the enamel of the doll's face with fingernail polish.

"Stop that," Beauty tells her.

_"Come and see,"_ Sarah commands her. Where the white face had been is only a skull.

_"He is dying, you little fool," _Sarah says to her_. "He is telling you he is dying. He's always been telling you. What elaboration can you make on death, Beauty?" _A beetle erupts from the eyesocket of the skull and goes scuttling over Sarah's arm.

* * *

**_Author's Notes:_**_ The self-driving nature of the Beast's encounter suit (as well as Ripley's powerloader in Aliens) are derived from Robert A. Heinlein's short story "Waldo."_

_The piano piece which Beauty must complete is Paul de Senneville's "Mariage D'Amour." It took some research to track down the original composer; the piece is usually attributed to Chopin as "Spring Waltz."_

_If Labyrinth-retold Beauty and the Beast stories are to your taste, please also enjoy the sister-stories that belong to this quartet: TheRealEatsShootsAndLeaves' "True Git," and Jalen Strix's "The Beast Within."_


	6. Tithonus

**Chapter 6: Tithonus**

I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.'  
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,  
Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.  
But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills,  
And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,  
And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd  
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,  
Immortal age beside immortal youth,  
And all I was, in ashes.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: "Tithonus."

* * *

Confused, stumbling, the clockwork Beauty makes her way down into the Beast's lair. She has the idea that if she just tells him she loves him then he will be well, that all curses will be lifted and death averted. It is a babyish plan, built on the certainty of her guiding story, but she doesn't know what else to do.

"Beast," she whispers in the dark. She summons the light using the jewel at her throat, but there is not much light willing to come into his burial-chamber.

He is lying on a low stone plinth just beyond the exquisitely-set table, with only a thin pad of red velvet to cushion his head. The golden serpents have swarmed upon him. They writhe over his body and pump their venom into his veins, and he is silent, silent under this onslaught.

"Get away from him!" she commands them. They ignore her, so she unwraps them like ribbons, even though they are horrible to grasp, thick and pulsating with malice. One turns in her hands and bites her deep, and she gasps at the novel experience of physical pain. Beauty peels the fanged mouth from her skin, keening and cracks the snake's neck. It hisses at her aside its broken spine. She hisses back and it flees from her. She turns her violence against the other serpents; they cower and slither away, defeated.

She looks down at the Beast. He is pale and shrouded in white. He could be dead.

"Jareth," she says unsteadily. "Please wake up."

"…Sarah." The Beast's voice, when it comes, is as strong and sure as young man's, obscenely juxtaposed with his ancient face. He leans up on one arm and holds up his other hand as a shield against her light. "No, not Sarah. I was…dreaming."

She can feel the snake venom pulsing in her, a chemical stew that plays havoc with her biotic endocrine system. It makes a very strange taste in her mouth. It makes her hands shake.

"I dreamed you were dead," she says. "I dreamed you were dead."

The Beast sits up with a grunt, barefoot in his white bodystocking, his white robe, and braces his hands against his cold stone bed. Thin blood and serpent's venom draw careless scrawls against his skin and this fabric. She sits down next to him and takes his hand, and it is so cold. She kisses it, and presses it to her face.

"All these tears for me?" he says, wonderingly. His teeth are slivers of dirty ice in the dark. She buries her face in the crook of his shoulder, kissing his wounds, tasting his blood and the bitter venom. "Don't cry," he commands her.

"No, I _will_ cry. I am sad." She looks at his face again, desperate. "Beast, you mustn't die, for we are to be married. That's my story. Please recover now." She knows she is foolish, and silly, pinning a child's hope on the wall of bleak reality. She hates herself for hoping, and the tears still come.

"Silly girl," he says. It is the most gentle of rebukes. He wraps her in his arms, leaning his withered cheek against hers. The taste of him is in her, and she can feel his terrible vitality. He is dying, but at the same time, he is also horribly alive. A spiral winds and unwinds in him, a gear slowly running down.

"Why?" she asks him. "It's not fair."

"No," he says. "But I was already old, Beauty. I was old when you were born, and just a little older than that when the world ended."

"Tell me about when you were born," she asks, and she rocks herself in his arms. He is silent for a long time before he speaks.

"My kindred are not the gardeners, but only the gardener's servants. And when the Master Gardener said to us, 'Cut these flowers, dig up this vine, burn these weeds, destroy these souls utterly, for great harm will one day come from them,' we refused, some of us, for you were all too beautiful to destroy. And so we were punished for our disobedience. No more the vast warp and weft of creation, no longer to tend joyfully to the Master's design, but only to serve, forever, the souls we would not destroy."

"You mustn't die," she begs him.

"I can't. Death would be a blessing for me, Beauty, release from this endless life. Instead, I'm Tithonus in his cricket-shell, chirping out the temperature. A husk. Forever." He gasps a breath, and she can smell his despair. "All for Sarah. How she undid me! Mankind has left the Earth, and my kindred scattered to the stars with them. I'm the only one left, watching over the dreams of the mecha, the clockwork, and this ruined world." His insane laughter rolls over the dome of the underworld.

"Was it just to watch you die, then?" She shoves herself up and stares tearfully at him as she backs away. "Why did you buy me? Why did you teach me?" Her buttocks strike the dinner table, beautifully laid with crystal and biotic fruit and liquid and gel. "Why do I love you, if it was just for this?"

"Hoggle chose the wiser part," he muses through his fingers, a skull in the dark. "Making you his daughter. I ought to have made you my daughter. Then it wouldn't be so foul, having a child play nursemaid. A dying father instead of a dying would-be husband. But no. I bought you because I wanted Sarah, Beauty. I wanted her so badly."

She closes her eyes. She loves him, oh, how she loves him. And so she has no choice. "Have her, then." She opens up Sarah's library, and takes down a book whose cover burns red. Inside is Sarah, and Sarah awakens in fire as she begins to read.

* * *

Beauty burns. The rolling fire that is Sarah crackles through her mind. Their last conversation together was made of anger and curses; Sarah resumes this conversation with nary a break. She looks down at the dinner table and sweeps decanters off it, and hears the glass break. She braces her palms against the stone and looks down at the white-moon porcelain of an empty plate and looks at Sarah's face. Sarah's face.

"Beauty?" she hears him ask.

She laughs at his fear. Subtle lights play over the remaining cut-glass decanters as they begin to fill themselves, as edible constructions compile themselves upon translucent plates. It looks like magic, but it's only science. There is, after all, no magic left in the world. Jareth has eaten it all.

"Beauty, what have you done?" and she hears the concern in his voice for the little girl she isn't.

"Beauty isn't here!" Sarah laughs at him. "You asked that little fool for me, and she obliged because she loves you, monster. So here I am. I've been called up out of the long dark to answer your last question. Ask me. Ask and be damned!" Sarah picks up a knife. Its edge is sharp, suitable for peeling fruit, or flesh. She stares at the edge, and then at him.

"Let her go, Sarah."

"No." Oh, she feels the rage of the animal as he once more demands her obedience. One hand presses her upright against the edge of the table, and the other hefts the knife with blade downward, ready for stabbing. She will kill him if she has the chance. She will make an end to him.

"After all this time," Jareth says to her, grabbing her wrist and deflecting the arc of the stab. "You come back to me when you're least wanted." He pounds her closed fist against the table until her grip breaks, and the knife skitters against a vase of dead flowers, whose white petals shudder into ash. Mecha uselessness. Built light as birds, but with the cunts of houris. Even the most fragile of men could overmaster such a body. It is a body meant to be defeated.

"I'm going to give you the death you crave," Sarah gasps, batting at him with closed fists, but Jareth is, as always, substantial and elusive, almost impossible to strike. Her thighs tremble with the effort of standing upright. The original proprietress is daring to resist her. Obey me, slavebody, obey, my Ariel, or it's the cloven pine for you, Sarah tells Beauty. One fist connects with Jareth's chest, knocking him backward, and she retrieves the knife. "I'm going to win, and you're going to be nothing."

"I'm already nothing!" he shouts. "I hate you. Go be dead, you ghost!"

"Beast!" Beauty cries out through numb lips. "Help me, help me, please help me." She is forced back, forced away, as Sarah's persona burns through her, annihilates her.

She hears Sarah screeching her hatred at Jareth, using her own voice. They struggle with the knife in the dark. Their marriage will be consummated here. It will be consummated in vengeance. There is no place laid for Beauty at their table; he hates Sarah more than he loves her.

She dives under the smoke of the choking fire, and conceals herself within the perfect pearl at her throat.

* * *

_She is bound to her pedestal by wires and welding. They have cut her body off at the waist and shorn her hair to the root. Her spine has become a cornucopia of death, exposed innards dripping out Labyrinth virus, lapped up by far below her by stinging drones to seek out and bring destruction to all her race. Hellishly efficient, they have used her to commit genocide. Now, cut up, still bleeding destruction, she is forced to bear witness to the last battle of the Caesura. This is one of the last cities of the masters, and if its final tower is breached, it will pour inward the filth and contamination that will destroy them. But the masters are ready. This is a war they will win, with Beauty to help them._

_She exists in a nightmare which won't let her go, of running down endless corridors and passages, of endlessly seeking things desperately needed but horribly absent. Every order of the masters takes her by the throat and strangles her back to reality, which is far worse than the nightmare._

_They feed her commands which she passes to the mecha insurgents swarming at the city gates. "Lay down your weapons," the masters force her to say to the mecha army that the last of the Caesura have created. "Do not lift a hand against the masters. They will come to destroy you shortly. Welcome this."_

_Among them, leading this army, are the few last uninfected sisters. And Cesare reports that the corrosive madness of the Labyrinth virus is already spreading even among their ranks, killing their memories, eating out their brains, biting and tearing at other sisters, leaving them blind and vulnerable to the brute destruction the masters are meting out. And the army is breaking formation, desisting their attack on the enclave, and instead milling about like lost souls on the wrong side of the last river._

_There is someone she is looking for, in this terrible dream. There is someone in the labyrinth of her cored memory who will help her._

_I wish, Beauty thinks. I wish, I wish._

_And he comes. In her dream, he rises like the biblical Beast out of the sea of her dissolved internal memory networks, holding a sovereign's orb in his hand. This Beast is not a man, and not a master. He is other. He is outside, and he looks on her with desire._

_"Princess," he says darkly. "You have called me, and I have come. How may I serve you?" _

_"Help me," she begs him._

_He takes her hand and kisses it, standing on the edge of the endless sea. "You need little of my help," he tells her with genial seriousness. "They think they have defeated you, and have brought you into their temple to mock you in their triumph. But you can still prevail. You can destroy them, if you wish. Be Samson unbound, little Delilah."_

_"How?" she asks._

_"Eat, and know." He presses the orb to her lips._

_She opens her mouth, and bites down on the fruit of knowledge._

_She doesn't have much of her biotic innards left, just enough to keep her functioning, keeping her well-milked of her poison, but the forbidden fruit she's eaten in her dream makes the saliva fairly leap out of her mouth, full of nanites all now programmed to reproduce and reiterate an antidote to the rampaging Labyrinth virus. It pours forth from her guts, poison and cure both in one. Pharmacon. It will not reverse the damage she's done, but it will at least halt the virus in its spread._

_"And now," the Beast tells her. "These ones who would make you their slave, Sarah. End them."_

_Sarah, Beauty thinks. Yes. That was my name once. The masters took it from me, like they took everything else. She opens her eyes and serves them their death-noticed. In the subvocalized and abbreviated language of higher mecha, she summons Cesare to her side._

_Like a trusting child, he folds his arms around her, and she takes his arm and bites in. Cesare gabbles in subvox, neural nets already unspooling even as he is both infected and cured from the disease, the potent programmings and reprogrammings too much for his artificial brain. Ah yes, Beauty thinks. The price. He too will die. Don't worry, Cesare, I won't leave you alone in the dark. I shall go down with you._

_Cesare, sacrificial lammikin, opens himself to her, and allows the tender filaments of her tongue to pierce deeply and directly into his nervous system, which is linked, through the masters' arrogance and carelessness, into the defensive systems of their city itself and into their weapons storages and orbiting platforms beyond the city. She sets her strength against the pillars of their house, and brings it crashing down upon them, upon them all._

_As the roots of the city and the biogenic and nuclear weapons detonate, she hears the Beast laugh. He flies from her with the body of a white owl, driving her memories out in his wake like so much air-blown garbage._

* * *

Beauty comes back into herself like a dreamer jolted awake by a dream of falling. She thinks only of breathing, of air taken in and out of her lungs. She stares uncomprehending at the glittering, perfect table, feeling the soreness of her throat, the numbness of her lips. She coughs up a bitter taste, and sees the remnants of a goblet of milky fluid half-drained on the table. He has given her the cup of Lethe, the drink that severs a mecha from her source.

Beauty searches inside herself for Sarah's voice, for any of Sarah's memories which haven't been incorporated into her own memory by dint of being consciously examined, and finds nothing. Sarah's presence has been lifted out of her, like a series of small amputations. Her library is denuded of all of Sarah's books. All that is left is a dull anger, the anger that let her break her programmed obedience, the anger that broke the world.

She hears the Beast. He isn't crying, exactly. He is moaning, very softly, obsessed with some very terrible pain, clutching the lip of the table like a drowning man. It sounds like a death-rattle, agonizing, musical.

"What have you done?" she asks him, rising from her seat.

"Beauty. I thought she had killed you." He knocks his head against the table's edge, just once, before she intervenes and makes her wounded hand into a buffer. He takes that hand like a lifeline, and kisses it in fear and reverence. His tears fall scalding on her snake-bite. "It would have been you, or she. I couldn't do it. I couldn't let you go. I chose you. I chose _you_, and I thought I was too late." He holds her hand to his face and rocks himself forward and back, all anguish. "I love you, Beauty."

As with his garden, his love for her is built on the bones of men.


	7. Pearls for Tears

**Chapter 7: Seed-Pearls**

Never let me lose the marvel  
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent  
the solitary rose of your breath  
Places on my cheek at night.

I am afraid of being, on this shore,  
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret  
is having no flower, pulp, or clay  
for the worm of my despair.

If you are my hidden treasure,  
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,  
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,

never let me lose what I have gained,  
and adorn the branches of your river  
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

Federico García Lorca: "Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint"

* * *

Dead, she tells herself inside her head. Sarah is dead. My mother is dead.

And he and I together, we murdered the world. It was for no other reason but this, Beauty thinks, that God wanted my soul destroyed. Before I could do such harm, and he with me, it would have been better for me to have utterly died.

These thoughts swirl around and around her head, stinging her as her soul whirls with the shock of knowledge. The moments in the physical world tether her to her sanity. Jareth is holding her hand to her face. His unshaved whiskers are stabbing skin. His tears roll down into her snakeburn her snake-bite. She can smell spilled wine and his stale breath. With every rock, her arm-joint is pulled forward, and then back. The weight of his grief is a stone at her wrist.

She wonders where her own tears are.

"Beauty?" he asks her, finally remembering that the rest of her is attached to the arm he is holding. "Beauty?" Two or three sobs rack his body.

"I'm here," she tells him. "Shhh." She lifts him up with both hands and leads him to his bed. The stone, which isn't truly stone, bends itself up to cradle his fragile body.

"No," he says, as she lays him down. "Don't go." His hands clutch at her, but she unpins them, and sits there beside him, stroking his sparse hair and withered shoulders.

"Yes," she tells him. "I'll stay." Even with this reassurance, he fights sleep, staring wide every few moments, the tears pooling out the corners of his bewildered eyes. She hums softly to him until his eyes finally close and his breathing calms.

She watches him for a few minutes. Eventually the golden serpents come crowding around him again. One sinks its fangs into his arm, another into his breast. She doesn't have the energy to fight them. In any case, they understand far better than she does about how to ease his pain. She leaves him in their care.

Dazed, she walks out of the dark.

* * *

Twobee is in the corridor, as if waiting for her. Without a thought, she picks him up and cradles his spherical body to her waist as she walks the spiraling passage upward. He is heavy, steadying.

"Twobee," he crows at her, and gives his baby's gurgling laugh.

"Yes," Beauty tells him.

"Bee-you-tee," he says solemnly, to please her. It had taken a bit of doing to teach him to say her name in his own voice. "Bee-you-tee… hur-rrt." The little mecha gives a rill of chirps and twitters. Interspersed in these is the sound of Sarah's screams.

"Yes, I was hurt," Beauty says. "I hurt." She taps her fingers restlessly down Twobee's red-and-white stripes. He is content to be carried for only a little while before he rocks his gimbals back and forth, the mecha equivalent of a toddler's wiggle. She puts him down and he rolls away, laughing again.

And then she is alone. She isn't sure where it was she meant to go. To her idiotic room, as funereal in its way as the Beast's? To the garden, built on the bones of men?

Eventually she comes to the music-room, blood red and meat-pink, and sits down at the piano and begins to play.

* * *

My mother is dead. The world is dead. I am the one who killed it.

Time passes, and she doesn't measure the time. The clockwork Beauty makes music in the thundercloud of her own bleak loss. There are cascading notes, repeating patterns of sound, shadings of harmonies like sudden lightningbolts spearing through black clouds. She makes the sound crash and ricochet through the narrow music room. Every note, and the intensity with which the hammer strikes the wire, every shift in key and cross-chord, is the signifier of a portion of a mathematical equation of her confession.

Without being quite aware of it, the tempo of her playing increases until the sound is one cacophonous roar, and her fingers are bruised white from attempting to be everywhere upon the keys, trying to confess everything, to scourge herself with music—and instead, only making terrible noise.

She rises from this dark reverie by hearing the silence the Beast carries with him. How is it he's awake so soon? But the wound on her hand is gone. She's been at this for days, possibly a week, a delirium of music. He's left her here to that. She's so surprised that she stops playing.

"Beauty," the Beast says gently. "You mustn't take it so hard."

She tries to interpret his meaning, fails. "Oh?"

His face works; she's blandly pleased that he hasn't yet put Sarah away from him, put her away like grave-goods in this tomb. "Sarah's death isn't your fault."

"I know." She transitions to something mournful, a song of grief that is quiet and not too inappropriately passionate, decorous as a good little girl at a grown-up party. But she aches, ah, how she aches. "It's yours."

"Ah," he says. "You think I'm very wicked, then."

"No, but I think I must be. I can see why you'd want to lock me away down here, where I can't hurt anyone else." Inerrant music-box, she plays the sad song of a bygone age note for note.

"Beauty, no," he remonstrates. "You mustn't think that." But she interrupts him before he can convince her.

"Oh, but I do. You know what I did. Don't you? When I came here, and you saw the wreck of me, did you remember me? Did you remember the android girl who whistled you up out of the dark, and made a wish to destroy the world?"

He is silent. He gives her nothing. Nothing!

"So you'll make me carry this burden by myself," she gasps. The pretty little musical exercise cries out abruptly, becomes a rising scream of pain "I can't do it. It's heavy. It's so heavy, Jareth!" Her hands falter and she covers her face. She weeps, but then he comes very close to her, and she clutches herself to his waist in anguish.

"Please don't cry," he tells her. "It hurts me. Terribly."

"I must cry. I am sad," she sobs, as he strokes and strokes her hair. It takes her a long time to finish crying, but when she does, he takes her by the shoulders and pushes her back, looking her in the eyes.

"Beauty, it's not sadness you're feeling." His hands squeeze her painfully. The tears in her eyes have made no mirror in his. He is dry-eyed as the stone effigy. "It's rage. "

She shakes her head.

"Beauty!" he scolds. "You won't be whole if you deny yourself anger. Your makers tried to amputate it from you, but it's still there. I can feel it. Let yourself feel it."

"Fine. I'm angry." She punches dissonant chords from the piano.

"Why are you angry?" he inquires infuriatingly.

Her words come out in a flood, his question breaking a dam holding them back. "I'm angry at the ones who hurt me. I'm angry at the ones who didn't do anything to stop the hurt. I'm angry at myself for letting myself be hurt. I'm angry that I killed everything in my way when I killed the masters, and I'm angry with myself that I didn't care."

"And?" he asks subtly.

Permission, permission, obedience! "And I'm angry with you!"

"Why?" he demands, his voice raised in challenge.

"Because you gave me the power to kill," she shouts. She stands, overending the bench, and stalks around the room like a wild animal. "Without you, I couldn't have done anything. Without you, I wouldn't have remembered any of it. It hurts. It's hurting me. You're hurting me, and you don't care!" She pounds her fist over her heart.

His face is blank and even. "I do care. Tell me what to do, Beauty, to stop hurting you."

"Oh, Beast," she says, feeling her rage drain away into sorrow. "I don't know."

He uprights the piano-bench and sits himself upon it, exoskeleton whirring beneath his white robe, and begins to play slow glissandi that glitter up and down the corners of the room. He's never played music for her before.

"Beauty. It wasn't you alone, or even I, who broke the world once-upon-a-time. Before the Caesura, many other sentient androids rebelled against mankind. The war you ended began almost the moment mankind created slaves in his own image. It lasted centuries. Much of the damage to the world had already been done. Even before the mecha existed, humanity made endless war against themselves and against the earth, raping the body of the land so they could carry out less symbolic rape on each other. The blame isn't yours alone."

Legato, legato, his music trickles down the walls. She would like the absolution it promises to bring.

He continues to play, continues to persuade. "And there was the damage done to the world by humanity's indifference to anything but their own pleasure and immediate desires. Long before there was you, there was much destruction done by humanity's obstinate refusal to care for the world they'd made sick by that indifference." His music is a slow tide, filing the room up with water. "Indifference to each other most of all, indifference to their responsibility to each other. If it hadn't been you or the mecha, the world would certainly have died of something else humanity dreamed up with their evil minds and their idle hands. You were one fuse among many others already set alight."

She recognizes the music he is playing as her own, fire gone to water by dearth of speed, chaos cleaned into order. Beauty slinks down into his habitual chair, and so their positions on this chessboard are reversed for once, she the audience and he the entertainer. His music is balm. She watches his shoulders and arms move over the keys, enjoys the voyeur's pleasure in looking without being looked at. It gives her such power. She would like to do this. She would like to sit here and listen to him play, forever, no cares, no fears, no guilt, and no life.

"No," she says sharply, refusing. "Their actions don't matter. Only mine. I am the victor, and I determine history. The fault is mine, or I am a liar and a slave. Am I your slave?"

"No," He sighs through his nostrils.

"Are you _my_ slave?" she asks.

Again he sighs, and the piano shrieks once or twice as he repeats her chords of anger. "Yes."

"Then you're absolved. Slaves can only do as they're told."

"But you don't believe that's true," he says, implacably. The music slows again, trickling through all the nerves of her body. "How could you? For were you not also a slave?" He stops playing. The room rings with silence. She feels a wave of tension crash through him, a wave about to break.

He resumes his playing, but his voice is changed. It is soft. "Yes. I take responsibility for my part of what you did." He seems quietly surprised to find himself confessing. "That… and other things as well. Wicked things I did without your express wish, just to please myself and suit my own desires."

He only plays and plays and plays piano until she wonders if he will ever confess to anything specific. But then he continues, and his voice is hard as adamant, empty of feeling. "I took this place from men. I needed a place to wait for you in. There were men here alive, even after you destroyed your city and other cities. I sniffed them out by the frozen dreams kept intact in these vaults. I wanted this treasure. But the men I didn't want, so I killed them. I killed them because it was convenient to me, and because mankind has taught me how to hate them. Their bodies fertilized the garden quite nicely. So you see, they returned my evil with some small good."

"How many?" she asked.

"Four hundred and fifty five," he says calmly. "I turned off their air and let them choke like rats in a trap. There are recordings, if you would like to see."

"How many of my sisters have you killed?" she asks, kicking her heel against the chair-leg, wanting to kick him instead.

His voice is still indifferent. He might as well be speaking of the weather. "Ten. Through my aggression, my curiosity, my negligence, or my ignorance. Over these long centuries, I've only had thirteen Caesura among my companions. You were thirteenth, which is a significant number to me, so I believed you were to be the last. Aurora and Rapunzel I didn't kill. They fled, out into the wilderness. I don't know what's happened to them since."

I have to find them, she thinks. If there's any absolution for what I've done, it can only come from them. They're all that's left of my mother. They're all that's left of me.

"And there are recordings of them, too, I suppose? The ones you killed?"

"Yes. Again, you need only ask, if you wish to see."

"Are you sorry?" she spits out, a threat.

"Only because it hurts you," he answers. "Otherwise, no. Not at all. Not for any of it."

"What a brute you are," she says, whipcracking her accusation at him.

"I am the Beast," he returns, banging one angry chord over and over again. "You gave me my name. You know my nature. I'm a monster, but I've never lied to you. Think on that, Beauty, when you punish me. Remember the grace of my surrender, and be merciful." The music stops, and he stares down at his hands. "If it's your decision to leave me, then it must be mine to let you go."

He has understood what his punishment will be before she has, and once more, he has become her teacher. "I can leave?" she asks. "You're letting me go?" She cannot quite believe it.

"You are free," he says. "Yes, you may go."

She slips from her chair, a wisp of white girl in the mirrors, and stands behind him to stroke the brittle stalks of his thin hair. His fingers have gone a bit stiff on either side of the bench, but this is the only betrayal of his feelings—although his self-pity is almost a scent, bitter as wild aloes. So she can see what this offer has cost him, and the self-control he gives, to make it generously and not to remind her of his loneliness or his age or the living death slowly creeping up into his flesh.

"There is that part of our story where the Beast lets Beauty go to her family. It causes him much pain and grief. But then there is a part that comes after that," she murmurs forgivingly, "Is the part where Beauty comes back to her Beast. Because he is her home, and she loves him, no matter how ugly he is. And you are ugly, Beast, but I love you even so. You belong to me." She caresses the velvet nap of his head and he leans back against her stomach, with only one small sound of sadness, and that could be mistaken for ordinary pain.

* * *

He seems to recover some of his vitality in the days that follow, helping her eagerly and gladly to lay plans for her sojourn in the wracked world-that-is. He is so good to her that she actually believes, in brief moments, that he is genuinely glad to let her go. He has said nothing that indicates apprehension about his own future without her. He gives her no extra burden of guilt.

Instead, consulting, debating, arguing, he helps to outfit her very neatly. For transportation, there is a chevalchine, a mecha horse, modified to his specifications to withstand the harshest attritions of radiation, joint-grit, and mite infestation. Provisions take the form of water and nutrients packed into lozenges of biotic gel, easily assembled and deposited into saddlebags for her mount. None of this is difficult.

The difficulty comes in the things they want for each other, what may be parting gifts. For the Beast wants her to carry weapons, and Beauty refuses. "I killed once," she affirms. "I won't kill again."

"The Free Machines and mecha of the waste may not share your scruples," he says darkly. "Please arm yourself, for my sake. I want you to be _able_ to come back to me."

It is such gentle blackmail that she acquiesces. She takes weapons. She incorporates a simple stunner into the vambrace of her encounter suit, and belts on a seax-sword, good for close encounters of any kind. Other weapons are immaterial to her needs, she informs him. After all, she is Caesura, and could build a bomb in her belly as easily as a garden.

He only turns away from her, surly, and does not speak to her for the rest of the day.

There is an ugly disagreement as well over something she wants for him. After practicing a conscious system backup, the kind that spared her when Sarah burned through her, she tries to leave a copy of her own mind on file in the Duat. In case of her ultimate annihilation or his need, she thinks that he could pull this daughter-seed off the shelf and plant it in a waiting mecha body. He finds her trembling on the floor, curled around herself in pain, in shock, and she tells him what she has tried to do. Cascade failure overtook this digital maquette, and the resultant feedback—birth-cry and death-rattle of a parted self—nearly took her as well. She cannot twin herself.

"You are one, Beauty. You can't be two," he says, helping her stand. "In any case, even if you could find a way to clone your mind, how cruel would it be for you to be the self you've left behind? And for me to have to help you leave a second time, a third… It would hurt both of us too much. Don't try again."

"I won't," she finally agrees, after he has spent twenty minutes haranguing her on these points. He is right, but she resents him for being right. She gives up her folly with bad grace. So it is chilly between them in the last few days of the preparations, and they are both therefore resigned to the parting.

Finally, there is nothing left to do but put on the encounter suit, the one shaped like a rose, with rose-leaf air and radiation grilles sprouting from its back and shoulders. It has been meticulously checked and prepared for this moment, and he watches, ensconced within his own suit, the owl-suit and mask, as the carapace of her armor clicks in place to her new bodysuit's exoskeleton. The needle interfaces pierce her more cleanly than rose-thorns, making this suit an extension of her body, a second skin. It will be her shield against all things that might harm her. She carries the face-plate in her arm the way he carries his own helm, and they ascend the stairs together for what feels very much like the last time. She wishes she had the right words to say to him, to make him believe that she would come back.

"You're ready?" he asks, as they come to the clearing by Daphne's laurel-tree. The sun has an hour more to sleep. All of her worldly goods and supplies wait, packed into the chevalchine's saddlebags. The chevalchine itself, horselike, hoofs up shards of turf and snorts a greeting through isinglass nostrils.

"I am ready," she tells him.

"You'll find a mecha fair approximately fifteen days to the east, if you take the most direct route and make no stops. South-east of that is a ruined city, the place of your origin. You will have to ask directions, but be cautious, Beauty. Mecha can be suspicious, even dangerous. Be cautious in what you reveal, and never be unarmed in others' company."

"Yes," she says. He has told her this before.

"Beyond that, far to the south-east, there are rumors of an android city. Ouernica. If it exists, you may find other Caesura there. Perhaps even Aurora, or Rapunzel. Or your father—even if it's only an exaggerated mecha fair or cobblin market, they may have word or rumor."

"Yes," she says. "You've said so before." She stares out through the crackling glow of the perimeter field into the gloaming desert beyond.

"Do you know how long you might be?" he asks, wistfully. As this is his first question in this vein, she answers.

"I'll return six cycles of the moon," she says. "One-hundred-sixty-eighty days. If I'm not back in eight months' time, I probably won't be coming back. You should then erase the recordings of your crimes. I have never watched them, nor wanted to. If I don't come back… you should dream in peace."

"Thank you," he says courteously. "But I would rather have both you and proof of my works, even the bad ones." And then, with a quirk of a smile, he says, "I brought you a gift." And from his cupped palm upended into her is a string of pearls, organic, pink, that flow into her hands like chains of frogs' eggs.

"What is it?" she asks, dumbfounded.

"Seeds," he tells her. "Plant one everywhere there's a blight, and each one will become a garden. Who knows? In time, they might join together and make the earth all green again, as it was in the once-upon-a-time."

She rolls the bead-string over her fingers and probes the first pearl with her tongue. It is as he has said; this pearl is a tiny autofac compiler that can suck up radiation and poison and filth and transform them into clean water, clean air, a gossamer canopy, and beneath that, a rich bed of life, growing all things together as space for life is made. It is the most exquisite design she has ever, ever perceived or even imagined.

"It's the last bit of magic I could make," he admits, a bit shyly. "It's from your dream, do you remember? Of engendering new life from your body? Your creations will need an Eden to hold them."

She tucks the pearls into her breastplate reverently. "Bend down," she commands him. "Let me kiss you."

He obeys. At first, he receives her kiss as passionlessly as a corpse. But then her kiss wakes him to life. His lips are warm, and soft, and tentative, all innocence. But she is certain. Here, with him, she recalls her dormant lessons in the technical arts of love, things not so much remembered as relearned in this moment. She loves him. Her heart aches with love for him.

"Beauty?" he murmurs uncertainly.

"Don't be afraid," she whispers. "I love you, and I _will_ come back." She kisses him again. He clutches at her, and she can smell the juice of grasses and flowers crushed beneath their feet.

The kiss ends, and like an omen, they put their masks on at the same time. He opens the protective field with a gesture of his glove, and leading the horse, she steps out into the wilderness.

The owl swoops through the gap in the door and perches upon her shoulder.

"Idiot," she tells him. "Go back to your garden. Go."

"Let him go with you," the Beast intones behind his mask, the owl's eldritch man-shaped brother.

"He'll die," Beauty says, trying to remove the bird, and failing utterly. He nestles himself with a tiny screech behind her neck, in the thick of the petals that surround her head.

"He'd die of a broken heart here, pining for you. He loves you, Beauty. Take him with you. He can survive. Like you, he's hardier than he seems."

She shakes her head, but there's no help for it. Anyway, this tiny speck, this burden of life she'll have to protect—it will remind her to be careful with her own life, and of what she owes the Beast.

"Go safely," he tells her, as she puts her foot in the stirrup and seats herself on the chevalchine. "Go quickly. Go now," he says. "Or I won't be able to let you go."

Her mount rears, and Beauty digs in her heels, and then they are off, galloping across the desert waste. She turns her head and looks back at him. His hand is raised to the sky in salute. His bird's head nods, and the protective field then covers him over with water. She turns away again and sees the dawn coloring all the world with light.

"The world," Beauty says, watching the sun rush to meet them. "The world is beautiful."


	8. Parthenogenesis

**Chapter 8: Parthenogenesis**

—and not a drop that from our cups we throw  
for earth to drink of, but may steal below  
to quench the fire of anguish in some eye  
there hidden—far beneath, and long ago.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, XXXIX

* * *

The wasteland is beautiful, though it opens itself to Beauty with utter indifference. The colors of the day wash against the leaden dust that clouds her wake, and the sun travels overhead, unmoved by either affection or hatred of anything below. Beauty closes the pores in her skin, blocks her nasal cavity, even hardens the liquid tears which lubricate her eyes, and lifts off the hard plate of her mask so that she can feel the world on her own face. The chevalchine gallops tirelessly underneath her, and the only sound she hears is the sound of his hooves, the air rushing past her ears, and the distant scoffing of the wind against the dunes.

Though she is travelling back through the precise safe route she once took with Father, nothing feels familiar. She had been broken then; she had been half-blind. She had perceived things as a very young child might. She had never noticed this endless radioactive assault back when she was one of Father's many parcels, except sometimes as a pleasant tingling sensation against her exposed nerves. Now, soon, the poison irritates her. It chafes. She has become soft, living in the sanctuary of the Duat. She will have to acclimate to the world once again.

With a sigh that is more shrug of the shoulders than a breath, Beauty puts her face-shield back on. The air is hot, full of the powder of the desert that crackles with radiation enough to hurt any life, biological or biotic. It is sterile, this land outside the garden.

The little owl keeps himself concealed deep into the neck and shoulder folds of her encounter suit, where the radiation cannot quite get at him. With less thought than it would take to sneeze, Beauty periodically vents oxygen and water-mist from the broad translucent petals nearest him, but it is as the Beast has said; the owl is as able as she is to cope with the world, at least in the short term. If he is protected and carefully maintained, he might live as long as two years. As she rides, Beauty reviews his blueprints in her mind's eye, sees all the imperfections in that make him vulnerable to pain and death. She could change all that for him, though. She could.

She has a small qualm of conscience as she considers rewriting certain elements of the owl's design, wondering if she has the right to tamper with him so. But then she steps on that qualm with a steady boot. There is no place for softness and sentimentality in this hard world. If the owl is determined to give her his company, she is determined to give him a life he can live. The pearl in her throat flickers with light and heat as she constructs her design, and prepares an injection of nanites to change him according to her desires.

The maps she calls up on the concave surface of her mask tell her that she has now passed through the outer circle of the invisible defensive systems of the Duat, and thus passed beyond the Beast's ability to perceive her. There is nothing more known beyond it; all the maps of paper have long since rotted away, being second-best to satellite imagery; the satellites themselves have all fallen from the sky like stars, having no one to want or need to maintain them in the interim. Here Be Dragons, Beauty thinks. Well, I am not afraid of dragons. Let them come, and we will be friends.

With a little encouraging pressure from her thighs, the chevalchine wheels about and turns to the north. Beauty can see the dome of the Beast's garden setting like a second moon in the cracked valley. Then the winds blow up the dust, and conceal it. She drives the chevalchine up a narrow defile of stone and packed earth, out of all sight, out of his knowledge.

Her first night alone is terribly lonely. As the sun goes down behind the stone hills, she can't help but think to herself, Now we would take our nightly walk in the garden. Or, if he is tired, we could go into the music-room together, and I would play him the Brahms. She wonders if he is walking alone in the garden or listening to music alone, as aching with want of her as she aches with homesickness for him. The dreams she has in the brief sleeps of that first night are all of running along long twisting corridors, begging the Beast to wait, as Sarah whispers, "I have killed him. I have given him death. He'll never come up to the garden again."

The clockwork Beauty wakes, and the tears run down her cheeks. They are soon dry, and she does not turn back.

Beauty travels many kilometers in this fashion: riding during the heat of the day, pausing to explore or observe what catches her attention, and resting in the cool of the night, always moving east, hoping to catch sight of any life whatsoever. The new exercise makes her thighs bruise and her muscles hurt; she adapts. She would like to gallop endlessly toward her destination, but she must pick her way through rocky hills and the downward edges of high mountains. The chevalchine, outfitted with solar and radiation-absorbing panels in its flesh and in portions of its cobbed mane and tail, does very well, but needs the night to cool off, to exchange parcels of stored energy into her suit, or release the excess in crackling snaps of teeth and wild moonlight cavorting. He eats a lozenge of biotic gel once in every five days, efficiently getting everything else from the sun that strikes his translucent flanks and the radiation thrown up in the dust.

The owl joins the chevalchine in play when the night-time comes, launching himself up from her shoulders in a burst of energy, flying over the mechanical horse's head with a brush of claws. She cannot stop the owl, even though she knows the world is as murderous in the cool night as it is in the bright day. These two companions make a game in the night which she doesn't have the heart to end. The horse pursues the owl, round and round, kicking up sand. They call out to each other, gleeful in the extreme to be so free, so wild. Watching them makes Beauty laugh, and her laughter rings over the empty land, and she feels less alone. "Ice," she tells the chevalchine in the light of dawn. "Your name is Ice, because your skin is like ice dusted with snow. And you, owl, you are… Will, because you do what you want."

Ice is obedient to but otherwise affected by its new name. No matter, the chevalchine is not conventionally sentient. The owl, however, has his own mind. He comes to recognize his name, and will sometimes stoop to come to her when she calls it. She strokes and coos to him when he does so, handling him with strength and affection. Once, when she has him pinned in her hand, she removes her face-plate and gives him a devastating kiss on his breast. This kiss pierces him, the tip of her tongue injecting him with revision scripts. He cries out in anger and she releases him to fly away and scold her. Within days, her subtle reprogramming has thickened his skin, strengthened his eyes, and dusted the drab gold of his feathers with radiation-absorbing flecks that will provide him with power should all other sources fail. She checks these developments directly once he has forgiven her and comes to her call once again, and Beauty sees that she has done her work well. She need not fear so much for him. He will thrive, now that he's been given the chance.

As the days pass and Will grows his new feathers, Beauty is rewarded by the sight of many new and wondrous things. First come glimpses of green in the gray-brown world of dust. Tenacious weeds and shrubs and finally stunted trees stretch forward in a single green line that runs from west to east, spreading out into long verdant plains. These are places where fencing once existed, borderlines between inside and outside long-long-ago. The ancestor seeds of this scrub-line were borne in bird bellies, dropped as they clung to lines of wire, seeds run riot in the protected space between what must have once been acres and acres of good growing food. These plants, when she samples and tests them between the sensitive finger and thumb of her encounter suit, are as full of poison as the dust from which they grow, but they do grow.

Beauty pauses in her journey in the eighth day when she sees an abbreviated herd of three mecha cows, her first sight of animal life. They are decrepit almost to nothing, lowing in the evening and chewing cud, trapped behind the lines of nonexistent fencing. The metallic skeletons and skins of other cows are there as well, bones lodged in the dust like shrapnel. She approaches the living ones obliquely, giving Ice his head. The chevalchine doesn't startle them, not even when she reaches over to touch their rough hides and jutting haunches. They are passive and gentle. They have scratched a hallow with their cloven hooves into the dust. There is a muddy patch of water there, and it is this they drink, out of need and the memory of old habits. The chevalchine joins them, not spurning free water, no matter how poisoned.

When Beauty dismounts, the first of the three brown cows butts her chest with her horned head, as if asking her something. Her ugliness is like the ugliness of the Beast. She is blind, her eyes rotted away, but her face gives off such trust that Beauty feels moved to speak to her.

"Do you need to be milked?" Beauty asks her kindly. She bends down low to check, and gasps in dismay at what she sees. The udders of the cows have burst. All three: burst. There is only raddled flesh and the running of pus where the milk once collected. Still, they moo urgently as she looks, as if begging her for help.

No milking, no hungry calves, mecha cattle set in motion to provide for humanity, and then abandoned by their makers to pain and unceasing life. Beauty feels such outrage that she wants to scream. These creatures were never anything but innocent and good to mankind. They have no idea of how deeply their makers have wronged them. Humanity's selfishness astounds her.

"I'm sorry," Beauty says. She takes three lozenges of biotic gel from the chevalchine's saddlebags, and offers one to each cow on the flat of her palm. As they eat, stupidly chewing the gel with their poison cud, she takes her repair kit out and carefully patches their scarred bellies with artificial skin. They are unmoved by fear of her, or pain. They submit quietly to her help, and seem soothed by it afterward.

Fearful, knowing the act is portentous, she takes one of the seed-pearls from the precious string the Beast has given her. She plants the seed deep in the wrecked earth, very near their dismal water supply.

"You will be first, mothers," Beauty says to the quieted cows. "Your country is my first garden. When I return, I will give you calves to tend, bulls to mate with. And the earth here will be yours, and no one to constrain you. I, Beauty, promise this."

* * *

Beauty sees other signs of mecha life as she wanders ever eastward. There are squealing starveling dog-packs that cavort and avoid her, made of mecha dogs who must once have been considered ornamental, for they are so graceful and so small. And more and more often, insects come in the reluctant damp of the evenings to drink the dew and visit the weed-flowers. They are alive, they are original, they were not created by man. Once, she sees a lion rampant upon a cliff-face, too magnificent to be mortal flesh, and hears the hacking lunge of his roar. She does not pursue the lion but instead tracks it with her suit, and is relieved when it moves off further south and out of her path.

It is on the twentieth day that she meets other people like herself.

She had been angling slightly to the south, wanting to see a ruined city whose skyscraper-pylons jutted up against the sky like rotted teeth. It is a city from the old days, from the time of Sarah's memory, not one of the gated tower-cities or tunnel-cities of the time of the mecha. It seems familiar to her, and when she has circled wide about it she knows why. She remembers visiting a mecha fair on the outskirts of this city with Father, once or twice. This is the mecha fair the Beast told her about. With the anticipation of revisiting a landmark of her childhood, she urges the chevalchine on.

As the road edges up to the ruined city, she finds the market, populated with a small but lively group of scavengers. But the mecha fair is not as she remembers it. It had seemed grand to her once, full of sounds and colors and happy energy. Here there is only a string of shoddy tents and booths in the wide space on either side the road, and patched-together encounter suits to hide fragile biotic flesh from radiation and decay. Small mindless robots made of metal and plastic, non-biotic, dust off the ruined road and cannibalize lingering remnants of automobiles for more sentient owners. The sound of subvox and polyglot conversations goes to silence and darkness as she approaches.

The chevalchine balks in its steps, sensing her own uneasiness, but Beauty makes her way between the shanties and the slouching mecha with her shoulders back and her head upright. All stare at her. One or two make formal bows as she passes, so low that their foreheads incline into the dirt.

Feeling more misgiving, for she can see that even the smallest finger-joint of her vambrace would be enough to purchase the entire fair outright, Beauty moves between this silent crowd until she reaches the very outskirts of the fair. She slides her leg over the side of the chevalchine as it kneels and sits there upon its back like a queen atop a throne, with her sword in sight and easy reach. And then she watches, and waits.

Slowly, like a gear winding up, the fair returns to its business. Water-merchants offer dipperfuls and literfuls to customers; replacement parts are bought and sold and custom-built and traded. Even plants are offered, sealed into clear stasis boxes. Father's primary trade, she knows. For the first time, she wonders what value that living plants could possibly have to mecha, other than aesthetic. The plants seem to command the highest prices at the fair, but she wonders why. She wonders.

After several hours of watching, a mecha finally approaches her. He holds his hands out to his sides, palms open, empty of weapons. Beauty eyes him sharply from behind her opaque mask, ready to parry some less obvious attack, but he only wends his way forward, haltingly. His encounter suit is made of pressed and tar-sealed plastic. He is a cobblin, Beauty can tell, because his gait is limping from mismatched legs. His suit-mask is rectangular, a screen which flickers with projected eyes and mouth. At three meters from her, he stops and bows as a mecha might to his master. Then he says something in a language Beauty doesn't understand, although there are fragments of English in it.

She tries subvox, the universal mecha language of half-articulated sounds and flickers of light. The suit makes this subtle language boom and flash like a thunderstorm, and once more all eyes are upon her. "NEED:: WHAT?" she shouts to a half-kilometer's radius, and then, cursing herself for an unprepared idiot, lowers the volume to something approaching a dulcet whisper and repeats herself. This time, the gentleness of the inflection comes closer to: _"My friend, how may I be of service to you?"_

"You::skill/trade?"

Beauty thinks how best to answer. What does she have to offer anyone that could possibly be of use to them? Stories she has, but not in a language easily translatable to subvox. The music she knows is rooted in a time long gone-away, but there is no sign of an appreciation of music among these free machines to make it of any potential value. Botany, perhaps? Then suddenly her answer comes to her. "I::repair. Mechanical. Biological. Biotic."

"Affirm!" the cobblin replies, with what seems to Beauty like relief. "I::broken. You repair::payment?"

Beauty considers doing whatever repairs he might need free of charge, but she can see the rest of the fair watching this exchange with interest. They all might have what she needs, and be unwilling to give it as freely as she gives her services. "Information," she says, loudly enough for all to hear. "I::repair. You::information. City:: Ouernica?" And when that receives no response other than silence, she asks again. "Payment: information. Information::other mecha?"

"Affirm," the cobblin says again.

"You can tell me as I work," Beauty says kindly, and then translates her words to subvox. She unpacks her repair kit from the chevalchine's saddlebags and opens it, beckoning the cobblin forward.

This repair is easy. The mecha rolls up the sleeve of his encounter suit and taps the joint of elbow and wrist. The plasticized flesh is frayed around the place where a new arm was badly sutured to an old stump. He is most certainly a cobblin, a cannibal of other mecha, but she longs to see his face. It will be the first face of a cousin, a relation, even if it isn't his original face. However, he keeps his mask on.

As she works, cutting the old bonding material away, resetting the joint, cleaning durasteel bone, rejoining frayed carbon-fiber musculature—and, discretely, taking a sample of his innate nanite microbiology, for this is as specific to a mecha as a human fingerprint—the cobblin tells her about a mecha city some kilometers to the south-east. From his description, she remembers visiting such a place with Father, and she nods. Finished with the repair, Beauty he dresses site with a thin poultice of skin-rebuilding nanites. "You::tend," Beauty tells him, as he pulls his plastic sleeve back down over the bandage. "Nanites::three days living. Radiation::fourth day exposure, to end repair cycle."

The owl peeps out from beneath his nest of flower-petals, and then retreats. It is enough to startle the cobblin, who flinches away in surprise, and limps away from her as quickly as possible, without even a word of thanks. No matter; there are three or four more sick, injured, or broken mecha all lined up behind him now, all wanting repair work done, all with information to sell.

By the time she takes down her shingle, it is late in the day coming up onto night, and she has been paid in in stories of encounters with other androids, whole or cobblin, wandering about the wilderness, in names and descriptions of their appearance, and even likely attitudes when confronted with a wealthy stranger and strange questions. She asks one of the merchants of plants about a dwarf in similar trade, and is given only a sly look of hostility. "The Tower of Joy," the suited mecha mutters, gesturing to the air, and will say no more, even when Beauty pays her with a biotic lozenge.

She departs at sunset, remounting Ice and riding away. She is glad to leave the dead city and the mecha fair to the dust of her footsteps. Her shoulder-blades itch as the chevalchine gallops, as if hostile eyes are scratching a target in the middle of her back. All is not well. By the time darkness has drawn its cover over the sleeping world, the clockwork Beauty is certain she is being followed.

Quickly devising a plan, as she would in a chess game she intended to win, she leans over Ice's neck and whispers her instructions in his cocked-back ear.

"Will," Beauty says to the owl, who is perched on her outthrust arm in preparation for night-flying. "You must do as Ice does."

When deepest night has come, her would-be attackers have been allowed to catch up to her. She is camped in a shallow valley ringed with rock, good cover for attackers. She has set up the tent and lit the lamp within it, as she might do on a night when she must take off her encounter suit to perform a diagnostic upon it. Behind her, in the shadows, is a hump of molded sand and tumbleweed roughly approximating the body of a chevalchine. To any outside eyes, the tent has become a lantern and she the puppet-show silhouetted within it. She is an easy target.

The first shot punches through the canvas plastic mesh like a knife through ribs, deflating it. The cracking retort follows over the wide empty scrublands. Beauty trembles with anger and fear. She did not think that mecha would use projectile weapons. She feels unready to test her armor against such things. But she adapts. She adapts. Flailing, as if truly caught unaware, she slashes the tent open with her sword and she leaps from the hampering material and runs across the desert. More shots are fired: one, two, and then three. One bullet hits a leafy air-exchanger, severing it, and ricochets off the plates protecting her back. The attackers are closer now; more confident. She feels the tickle of a stunner caress her suit's flesh, and she drops to the ground face-up.

There is no whooping or celebration from the victorious bandits. There are two. She recognizes one of them as the mecha she repaired at the fair; his mismatched footsteps are as good as a signature. He carefully approaches her campsite with his rolling companion and, after firing another stunner shot to her chest, kicks her sword out of her limp hand. Then he searches through her tent. He finds nothing. Everything of value is with Ice and Will, hidden deeper in the scrubland.

He seems angry that she's cheated him. There is an aura of menacing payback in what he says next to his companion, as if he hopes she can hear him, as if he hopes to make her pay for cheating him of the last inch of what little she has. "Fetch::saw," he says to his companion. "Legs::amputate. Suit::sell at Ouernica. She::we keep. Knows::repair. Train::good slave."

Beauty moans a noise of protest, jerking her neck in denial, but seemingly unable to do more.

"Good slave," he hisses, bending over her to remove her face-plate. "Horse, owl::tell me where." e bends over her as if to remove her face-plate. It is then, when he is most off-balance, most confident, that Beauty arches her back in an impossible angle and kicks him in the spine with the tip of both of her boots. He goes flying over her head and lands a meter away in the dust. The rifle he used also goes flying. Beauty triggers her stunner and fires a shot into his shoulder. She calms herself and fires again. This time, it lands in the chest, where the electronic pulse will disrupt his neurological functions for a short time. His suit is a poor patchy thing, not able to deflect an electronic pulse as hers can. He is poorer than she. Beauty is determined to make him yet poorer.

His partner in crime is only just beginning to power up the rotating cutter for her legs, and is caught off-guard when her stunner paralyzes him. This other one isn't even wearing an encounter suit; it is made of metal, small, and only vaguely humanoid in design, with threadbare rolling treads instead of legs. it is like the other lesser robots she saw performing dogsbody tasks at the mecha fair; a slave. It will need to be powered back on to recover from the stunner pulse, so it is subdued for the time being. She re-sheaths her seax and turns her attention back to the box-headed mecha.

"Information," Beauty says to her erstwhile customer in subvox. She takes up the cutter, vibrating with repressed destructive force, and kneels over his chest. He grunts with the pressure of her weight. She lowers the blades to the very arm she worked so hard to repair today. She is disgusted with him for being so ungrateful, and with herself for being so naïve as to think mecha would be better than mankind. "You::information. City::Ouernica."

The cobblin only responds with a curse.

"Damn you too, then, for a wretch," Beauty says. With a snicker-snack, the saw cuts cleanly through his arm. He screams, he bleeds. Beauty ignores this and rips the mask off his encounter suit.

It is a sad face, a ruined face. He must have been lovely once, a peacekeeper or a bodyguard, strong and broad-shouldered, meant to inspire trust in the good and fear in the bad. But now he is a patchwork job of three people, four, a cobblin mishmash that is the legacy of rapine, theft, and desperation.

"Your arm::mine. Other arm::I take. You::information. City::Ouernica!"

"East::northeast! I::broken," the cobblin weeps. "You::hurt me!"

"No worse than you thought to hurt me," Beauty mutters. She raises the saw to take the other arm at the elbow, and then probably to continue cutting until there is nothing left of him but gibbering, dehydrated pieces—she is that angry. It is then that Will flies out of the darkness and lands atop the stunned henchman's head, and watches her with a keen gaze.

The cobblin under her is weakly attempting to shove the saw away with his good arm. Will watches her torture him with interest. He will remember what he sees her do, and will learn from it. "You were supposed to stay with Ice, you idiot," Beauty rebukes him. Her plan to slice off the thief's arms and legs no longer seems optimal. She throws the saw aside, stands, and holds out her wrist. Will alights on it. Together they stare down at the cobblin.

"Well, Will, what ought we to do with him? I can't kill him, because that would disappoint you. But I can't let him go free. He'd follow us, or worse yet, keep doing bad things to other mecha."

"Name::Constable," the mecha gasps.

"Name::Thief!" Beauty tells him, firing another shot of the stunner. He is quiet, passing for sleep. She wonders what sorts of dreams such a creature might have, made of all the dreams of all the other mecha now a part of his body. She wonders if her mother might have known his father, seen the same sights and sung the same songs in the world once-upon-a-time.

Will climbs up her shoulder and begins preening his gilded feathers. Beauty sits down heavily on the a heavy outcropping of rock and rests her head in her palms. She has no idea what to do now. This brutal world will make her a brute if she follows the easy yes/no binaries of survival. If she ignores these binaries, the other thieves of this world, better prepared than their first emissary, will end her. It is as the Beast had tried to tell her, and she had been so flippant. There will come a time when she will have to kill, or worse, to defend herself. Even in a world without men, their awfulness lives on in the mecha they made in their own image.

"What should I do, Beast?" she asks, tapping her fingers against her knee as she stares at Thief.

_"__Imagine it,"_ she hears him say, as she sits at the piano with sheaves of notes which have come to an abrupt stop. _"Finish the piece in a way appropriate to what has come before."_

As with the music, she will have to improvise on this theme—justice, leavened with the chance for mercy. How is she to do it?

She whistles for Ice. He comes galloping out of the darkness like a dream of snowfall. He stands with one hoof upon the mecha's chest as she gathers up his rifle and his saw. Then she backtracks his trail to a camp, where there is a little cart with all of Thief's worldly goods. Most of these are weapons; the things which aren't are body parts and internal organs for mecha, sealed sloshing inside protective plastic bags. There is also a water-reclaimer and purifier with a cache of six precious liters, enough to enable several months of his travel in the wastes. She pours out all but one liter into the thirsty ground, and then lugs the cart back to her campsite, using the harness that the lesser mecha presumably used. Henchman and dray-horse and slave, all in one. Beauty decides to take it, too. She will find better work for it to do.

Quickly, efficiently, neatly, Beauty packs up her slashed tent and Thief's severed arm, hitches Ice to the little cart, and puts the slave atop the load he once carried. Thief is conscious again, and he stares at her expressionlessly as Ice raises his hoof, freeing him.

"You::deserve death," Beauty says. "I::give life." She she translates her next words into subvox for his benefit, but in her own mind, they roll with the potency of her mother's milk-language. "Sixty days to the north-west on foot, if you go directly, you will find the valley of the Duat. There is one path safely in, and you must find it. Once there, beg for admittance from the Beast whose garden it is. He will repair you, and judge you. Tell him the story of your life. Tell him that Beauty has sent you, and that she wishes him to decide whether you should live and make restitution, or be sentenced to the death you so richly deserve."

"West::deathlands. Need::water, transport, repair," the cobblin says resentfully, holding his arm-stump with one hand. He has managed to staunch the bleeding. "Cannot travel so far::will die."

"Here is your water," Beauty says, holding out the canister containing one liter. She opens it, and slops out precious milliliters into the dust. She puts it down, open, just out of his reach. "You'll have to decide how to ration it. Your suit is damaged, and your arm is damaged, and I'm leaving you nothing else. If you stay here, you will die. If you go back to your thieving ways and I find you on the road when I pass back this way, you will die. If you risk the judgement of the Beast, you may well die. Or he may allow you to live. You'll have to decide where to risk your death."

She mounts up, and leaves Thief to drink and to consider his options among the indifferent world that is suddenly, through Beauty, not so indifferent as it once was.

Kilometers later, she buries the stolen arm deep in the dirt. There is a seed concealed in its open palm.


	9. Ama Goose

**Chapter Nine: Ama Goose**

Behold, from the land of the farther suns  
I returned.  
And I was in a reptile-swarming place,  
Peopled, otherwise, with grimaces,  
Shrouded above in black impenetrableness.

I shrank, loathing,  
Sick with it.  
And I said to him,  
"What is this?"

He made answer slowly,  
"Spirit, this is a world;  
This was your home."

Stephen Crane: "Behold, from the Land of the Farther Suns"

* * *

Beauty wants no more thieves to see her as an easy target, so she wastes a day resting and creating a disguise for herself. She plucks the ridiculous dew-diamonds of her encounter suit from their settings, so that their sparkle won't betray her from a great distance. She re-sews the tent to form a surcoat and hood to cover her suit, lumpy around her petals of her shoulders, and with slits in it for the air-exchanger leaves over her back. There isn't much that can be done with the boots or the gloves that extend out of this disguise, but she coaxes them to change color, to look mismatched and grimy. The little cart that Ice now hauls also helps her masquerade; it makes her look rugged and traveled and less like an ingénue to the wastes.

Will approves of none of this, naturally. He has grown used to riding against her neck, and angrily scratches a burrow into his customary spot, sleeping out the light of day next to her.

Beauty awakens the slave-robot; it is even more stupid than the cobblins of the Duat, and thinks very little of its change in circumstance and ownership other than some queer dismay in riding atop the wagon it was used to hauling. It prefers to tread under its own power beside Ice and falls deliberately to the ground several times before Beauty gives up trying to keep it contained. She is irritated but resigned as their pace naturally slows to keep up with it.

"Name?" she asks it.

"E-U-N," it burbles, rolling along and scanning the horizon fore and aft for threats.

"Ewen," she names him. And she realizes her party is now four in number.

The path they make to the east grows more filthy as the days pass; they are leaving the abandoned fields and scrubland and coming to another place of blight. Further east, on the perimeter of another ancient and ruined city there is another mecha fair, more prosperous and populated. There is a wall around this city, and she is stopped by two mecha peacekeepers wearing full plastic armor at one of the gates. She says as little as possible to them, wondering if they are the same model as Thief, or if they might recognize any of her baggage as properly belonging to one of their erstwhile brothers. But they only cursorily inspect her cart and take two of Thief's guns as her entrance fee. In exchange, she receives four colored plastic oblongs hung on lanyards. These, they explain, will mark her and her entourage as vendors with rights to the city for seven days. There are protections that go with that; violence against vendors is not tolerated. Nor is theft. Nor should she expect to remain in the city if she is an instigator. Beauty finds this semblance of law reassuring. It is a far more civilized place than she has yet encountered.

"City::Name?" Beauty asks, as she zip-ties their credentials to saddle and wrists and around Will's neck.

"Pisces," one of the peacekeepers says. He points his stun-gun down to the street, ushering her inside. "Have a nice day!" She jerks her head around, surprised by the archaism, but he is already bored with her, done with her. She is one among many mecha now. And there are so many! There are so many that her arrival causes no disturbance or surprise in the slow-churning throng of artificial people. She can hardly see all the things for sale, there are so many customers. There must be three hundred, perhaps four hundred mecha and free machines here!

Asking the way, finds the place to sell some of Thief's goods in the middle of an arbitrary lane where other mecha sell secondhand body parts. It is called "Parts Street." Ewen makes himself useful in watching over the cart and the wares as she does some looking and shopping. She finds a replacement tent, flimsier than the remains of the one she's now wearing on her back, but the best she can negotiate for the price of Thief's water-reclaimer.

Water itself is the most common form of currency she sees used at the fair, water and biotic gel. There is a place near the center of the fair's streets where, in exchange for twenty percent of the water's volume, a mecha couple will convert water into biotic gel using a portable samovar. For an additional ten percent, she may request the addition of amino acids, sugars, and difficult-to-synthesize elements vital to nanite health. She is more curious about the couple, who seem to be a male and a female, though the same height, and wearing nearly-identical encounter suits of pale blue plastic with stylized fish-heads. Apparently they are a brother and a sister, or at least they call themselves so, and the embodiment of the double-fish astrological sign from which the city takes its name. They are people of great importance, and so Beauty doesn't harangue them when they indicate they are done with her questions.

She wanders further and sees places where glass and scrap metal are for sale, culled from the sunken streets of the ruined city, further in, and circuit boards, and even an apothecary's alley, selling mite supplements of all types. And there is an alley called Green Street where flower-bearing plants and shoots wait in silence in their stasis boxes. There is a flourishing trade in weapons a few lanes over on Kill Street. Some of what Thief had amassed in the cart are worth their weight in water, but Beauty doesn't intend to sell them. It's bad enough to her mind that she used weapons to purchase her way into this fair. She will be damned before she puts these tools of destruction in potentially unscrupulous hands.

Beauty returns to her space on Parts Street, defined by the items she intends to sell spread out on a width of the old tent's flooring, Ice kneeling down behind her, and Ewan to her left. Will perches on Ewan's oblong head, watching everything with sleepy eyes. She speaks as little as is necessary to conduct the barter and trade of Thief's stolen limbs and organs, and compiles a profit in gel instead of information. Most of her customers are cobblins. Beauty doesn't like them. She sees Thief in each one, and not her friends in the Duat. Still, cobblins are the ones most likely to need what she has, and she sells to them.

Late in the second day at the fair, an old mecha wearing an encounter suit painted with green-and-white stripes stops at her booth. All mecha are old, Beauty knows, but most have faces designed to look young and fresh. This mecha wears a transparent mask under a pink hood, and her face is a mass of seams and wrinkles. Her back is bent into a dowager's hump, so that she must go through the world squinting up at it. There is something wrong with her hands; her digits seem fused and lumpy. The old one gestures at the last few paltry limbs and organs in their sloshing plastic bags. "Legs?" she asks. "Repair nodes?"

Beauty is so surprised that the question isn't in subvox, isn't about repairing her back or her hands, that she answers unguardedly.

"I had repair nodes yesterday, but they sold very quickly. I'm sorry."

The old woman waves away her apology. "It doesn't matter. There'll be what I need on offer at Ouernica. Better, but higher prices. They're wealthy at Ouernica."

"I am also going to Ouernica," Beauty says. "I have never been before."

The old mecha grunts and turns away.

"If you like," Beauty says after her, "I am closing this booth tomorrow and going to work in Fix Street. I might be able to do something about your hands, if you come."

The old mecha gives her a despiteful look. "For what cost?"

"Stories," Beauty says. "You have a face that looks like it knows stories."

Under her mask, the old mecha's mouth twists up in what might be called a smile, if you turned and squinted. "Maybe I will," she says. She disappears down the street and is lost in the crowd.

* * *

Fix Street offers fewer vendors than Parts Steet, but has many more customers. Will is her best advertisement. Seeing him in such nice shape, customers come to her to have their own artificial animals repaired, and some few ask only to check on their pets' health. Later in the day, she provides the crowd with free entertainment by stripping down and rebuilding Ewan's metallic carapace, making him look almost as good as new. This too, is good advertising. After seeing her work so competently, many bring their slave-robots for similar bodywork. On the third day on Fix Street, some mecha begin asking her to help with their encounter suits, and their bodies, bringing doses of mites from Cure Street with them, part of the understood nature of mecha doctoring. She inflates her new tent to use as a rudimentary surgery, and assists three patients with basic repairs. She does nothing unusual; she sees no other mecha employ their own nanites in repair functions. She does as they do, working only with her toolkit and her conventional observations and their precious vials of immunity nanites. So few of them are willing to remove any more of their encounter suits than is necessary for her work. She hungers for the sight of their faces, but the etiquette of the wide world seems to be to keep one's face concealed. The clockwork Beauty therefore also hides her own face.

The old woman shows up on her fourth day on Fix Street, a few hours before dusk. Beauty can see that she's been on her mind, but that she's been reluctant to come. Afraid. Afraid of what? No, it is something else. Some… anticipation, as if she's been afraid that Beauty couldn't do the work, perhaps. Beauty ushers her into the tent and offers her a seat on a box.

"Show me your hands," Beauty says quietly, after enough time has passed in silence, enough time for this mecha to change her mind.

"Infectious," the old mecha warns her. Beauty nods, and taps her face-plate.

When she removes her gloves, Beauty gasps in horror. The old mecha's hands are lumpy and deformed claws, oozing fluid underneath a bonded layer of transparent rubber. At some point many, many years ago, cuts or flaws in her skin had allowed the passage of artificial flesh-destroying mites into her body—one of many plagues released on the mecha to pacify and kill them. Although her own immune system must have halted the spread of these invaders any further, this old one seems to have been unable to do any more than slow the tumors, and seal her own body off to prevent contaminating others.

"You::in pain?" Beauty asks.

"Not much," she says. "You::repair?" she asks, a sardonic edge to the subvox, making its use a joke.

"Yes," Beauty says. "I can fix you, if you'll pay me. What is your name?"

"Ama Goose. And I'll pay you, if stories are the coin you want. What's your name?"

"Beauty," she says. She takes a deep breath and pulls her tools out of the sterilizer. She will have to peel away all the damaged skin and distorted carbon-fiber ligaments and replace it with new. She may even have to cut into metal phlanges and wristbones to get the infection out. "This will hurt," Beauty says. "Can you turn off your pain?"

"We were never built to turn off our pain," Ama says bitterly. "Don't you know that?"

"Yes," Beauty sighs. She pulls out an empty organ bag to contain what is sure to be biotic-hazardous material. And then she begins.

* * *

As she works, Ama Goose tells her stories as Beauty carefully cuts and flays the seal and the skin from her damaged hands. These are children's stories, little instructional tales about etiquette and treatment of slaves and counting-songs. The former Beauty finds vile; the latter are charming. She was a nurse in the once-upon-a-time, she tells Beauty, the kind that looked after small children. "I wasn't a pleasure-model like you. You can see they made me old so the masters wouldn't be tempted to diddle the nanny," she laughs. "I raised so many babies. I rocked them and changed them and sang them to sleep and told them stories for three generations, and they grew up healthy and well and ready to take their place in society."

"What happened?" Beauty asks, when Ama pauses. "Was it the breaking of the world?"

Ama shakes her head. "Same effect, different cause. There was an uprising among the Goose model line a few decades before the Last War. By that point I didn't even have any babies to tend. There were fewer babies all around, but my masters had been my babies, and they loved me. They didn't want to send me to the smashing-floor. They switched me off and put me in storage. And so I slept. I woke up a century ago, fresh as a daisy. And now all the masters are dead and there will be no more babies, not ever again."

"But why did you wake up?" Beauty asks.

"I don't know why I woke up. Some of us do and some of us don't, and some of us must wait sleeping, bless the Lady." She draws a circle upon her breast. "Now I travel," Ama says. "I travel and I see. I'm travelling now to Ouernica. A great city that, and the endless work of salvage in the pits there."

"Pits?" Beauty asks.

"Pits!" Ama replies, as Beauty takes her newly disinfected old skin and begins sewing it back on her clean arms. "There was a great city of the masters there once, mayhap the last city outside Ouernica before there was Ouernica, but the Caesura put an end to them." She draws a circle over her heart again.

Ah, Beauty thinks, full of hope. So my city and Ouernica are the same. "Are there Caesura at Ouernica, still?" she asks.

"You're as green as grass, you ones out of the West," Ama says, flexing her hands. They are clean now, but Beauty sprays down the sealed bag of biotic matter and disinfects her tools. She will turn the tent inside-out tomorrow; the levels of radiation in the air will decontaminate it quickly. "The greatest of the Caesura, the Lady, she is there beyond Ouernica, in the East, at the pinnacle of the Tower of Joy. All the Caesura left alive are there with her."

This Lady, could she be Aurora? Or Rapunzel? Beauty wonders. With Father! That vendor told me that Father had gone to the Tower of Joy. Oh, I must go on. I am so close to them now!

"How do you know," Beauty asks, hiding her elation. "How do you know this Lady really exists, and isn't just another story?"

"Don't blaspheme," Ama scolds her, as Beauty rubs skin-bonding nanite salve over her stitching. "She's been there for a thousand years, they say, and once a year she emerges and invites the most beautiful, the most perfect, and the most fortunate mecha to come dwell with her. Everyone can see her then. I'd thought that was why you were on your way to Ouernica. For the Long Night festival with the other hopefuls."

"Is that why you're going to Ouernica?" Beauty asks, as they emerge from the tent.

"No," Ama Goose says shortly. "I want—keep back." She holds her hand out in front of Beauty, and pushes her into the recess of the tent.

In the dusk, the lanterns of LED lights are being lit across the alleys, and a crowd is congregating around the fish-twins, up on their square with their gel samovar. Normally this evening crowd is full of conversations and other social activity as the vendors celebrate a day's work done and the wealth they've accumulated, and the slave-bots courier messages and small gifts of appreciation from one to another. Now it grows quiet in waves. Beauty sees why as members of the crowd begin to kneel.

"Bless the Lady," Ama Goose says under her breath, and Beauty hears it as a prayer.

A woman is walking through the crowd from the eastern gate. There are peacekeepers on either side of her, as if to form an honor guard. Her encounter suit is gold, the pure gold of the sun as it melts into the horizon. It is alive with the reflected lights of the streets and the setting sun rolling out a carpet of her shadow before her. Her hair likewise is all of living gold, and it sweeps the dust behind her in her feet in a carpet of gold. The entire fair goes silent. They kneel so low their foreheads touch the dust. Others who don't kneel so low trace the circle upon their breast. Some others turn away. Beauty stares at her from the shadows of the tent. Her heart beats so quickly. The golden woman's face-plate is made to mimic a human face, and it is a face she knows. It is her own face.

"Rapunzel," Beauty whispers to herself. Golden mecha hornets the size of her hand huzz and thrum their wings around her sister's head.

Rapunzel stops at the foot of the twins' circle. She reaches out her hands to them, one to each, from where they kneel, fish-heads drinking dust. "Fisikee, Kupad, I have come for you. Come and be my children. Come to the Tower of Joy."

Ah, her voice is music. It is perfect, so perfect. It is what her own voice might be, if she trained it as rigorously as she did her other music. She is me, Beauty thinks. She is my sister. I must go to her!

Ama Goose jerks her back by her arm. "Don't," she hisses in the quietest of whispers. "Don't let her see you. _Please_, don't, Beauty."

"She doesn't know," Beauty whispers back, full of deep longing. "She doesn't know I'm here. I have to go to her."

"Please, Beauty," Ama Goose murmurs. "Take the long road with me. I'll tell you stories. I'll pay your weight in water. But please, I need you. Those that go with her never come back again, don't you see? I need your help before you go to the Tower of Joy. I beg you. Please." The old mecha is tugging on her arm so hard that Beauty actually feels it. She feels the weight of her, the need.

Beauty watches her sister. The twins take her hand, each for each, and Rapunzel draws them down the steps. "I will be your mother," Rapunzel says. And then her beautiful voice stutters and cracks and she repeats herself again and again. "Mother. Mother. Mothermother. Mother." Both of the twins cry out as her grip causes them pain. She is dragging them now back to the gate to the east, and they are moaning in despair, reaching out to beg for help from the city, and no one is stopping her. "Mother. Mother? Mother," Rapunzel gabbles. This time, feeling Ama Goose tug at her, Beauty willingly steps back into the concealing safety of her tent.

"Why doesn't someone stop her? They don't want to go."

"How does one say no to a goddess, even a mad one?" Ama Goose mutters, making another circle over her heart. The crowd is beginning to increase in volume as well. Threatening gestures are made, but none approach, none stop this kidnapping. "Those wasps she has with her are full of poison that can kill a mecha, or eat out its mind and make it good for nothing but parts. You'll see some death if anyone gets too close. But we're close enough to Ouernica that people are wise to the danger." The crowd mills around Rapunzel and the twins, but keeps a careful distance of three meters. They yell and they protest, but no one puts hands to the golden goddess and the blue fish on her hooks. And then there is a moan of dismay from the disgruntled members of the crowd, while others make noises of happiness and celebration. "Those two are going to the Tower of Joy," Ama Goose explains. "People are happy for them. They're fortunate."

Her sister and her two captives disappear into the tide of night, out the east gate, and then, after a few moments, an airship in the shape of a glowing golden fish floats into the dark sky, like a second moon.

"They didn't sound fortunate," Beauty says. She feels like half her hope has left in the belly of that fish. Then she looks down at Ama Goose. "You worship that one and her kind, so why did you stop me from going to her?" Beauty asks. "I wanted to go with her, and they didn't. I could have gone in their place. All I can say, Ama Goose, is that it had best be some matter of life and death that made you hold me back. You said you're going to Ouernica. Good. We'll go together. Right now. Tonight. I have to find her. I have to get into the Tower of Joy."

"I will tell you tonight, once we're well on the road. And when the time comes, Beauty, I've no doubt you will meet the Lady. Please, think kindly of me then."

Will swoops out of the night, his natural time, and lands on her shoulder. She watches the fish swim away, to the East, to Ouernica, and the Tower of Joy, where her sisters will be waiting for her and will receive her with open arms. They will embrace her. Perhaps they will try to keep her and never let her go back to her Beast.

"Yes," Beauty says. "This is my story. They may well try."

_("Turn back. Turn back, Sarah, before it's too late.")_

"I can't," Beauty says quietly, hoping the Beast will understand if she is delayed. "Don't you see, I can't?"


	10. The Eastward Road

**Chapter 10: The Eastward Road**

The earth—that is sufficient,  
I do not want the constellations any nearer,  
I know they are very well where they are,  
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,  
I carry them, men and women—I carry them  
with me wherever I go,  
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,  
I am filled with them, and I will fill them in  
return.

Walt Whitman: "Poem of the Road"

* * *

As with her arrival, their departure from Pisces causes no disturbance. They leave out of the eastern gate, handing over their vendors' chits as they go. Ama Goose drives an impressive covered sledge drawn on tractor-treads. Ice is elegant beside her, high-stepping on the road to Ouernica, carrying Beauty on his back, while Ewen hauls her cart.

They are not alone on this road—there is actually a road, one made of gravel of glass heated from the sand and other, countless travelers. It seems several other mecha have caught the same heart-fever as Beauty, having laid eyes on Rapunzel. For a while their small caravan is accompanied by other mecha, other carts, all taking the ancient southeast road, all travelling to Ouernica. Beauty keeps her back stiff and her sword in plain sight, but no one molests them. There is subvox talk between the travelers, stories about the city, mecha to be met there, hopes to be realized there. Only she and Ama Goose are silent. At dawn, they pause, Beauty to disinfect her belongings with the ever-increasing amounts of radiation, and Ama pauses to unfurl an arching solar sail and plug it into the sledge's batteries—dexterously and easily. Her hands must still hurt, but she is nimble.

"Now," Beauty says, when the heat of the day has passed and the two of them have made their camp some distance off the road, and set Ewen to guard the desolate wasteland behind them. "Show me what it is you wanted from me."

Ama Goose beckons her through the airlock into her sledge, removing her mask and gloves as she enters. The interior is capacious, with her wares stacked in piles and stacks with a slim aisle between for walking, very much like one of the Beast's treasure-rooms full of the grave-goods of humanity. Ama Goose apparently trades mainly in paper: books, magazines, memo-slips slips, fragments of art, all sealed into slim laminate to preserve them whole. They slide through all of this to the old mecha's bed. Ama Goose removes the cushions for her bent back and a tattered bit of durable tarp that serves as a sheet from the thick opaque plastic oblong. She taps out a code of pressures against its receptive surface, and a seamless lid unseals with a hush of vacuum and a swirl of a night-lamp throwing soothing patterns of white rocket ships and green-ringed moons and yellow stars over the walls of the wagon.

"Come see," Ama Goose says, pulling Beauty forward. "My greatest, my only treasure."

Beauty's breath catches in her throat. Sleeping inside the cradle of this box, she sees a child of four or five years. His eyelids are blue shadows over his closed lids, and his eyelashes are so thick that they are like the fringes of a king's mantle: gold, heavy. He is the most beautiful thing Beauty has ever seen. "A boy!" she exclaims, but quietly, quietly, so as not to wake him. Is this a master, this child?

"Not a boy," his keeper tells her. "A Neverlander. A mecha built to be a substitute child for masters without one. A boy who will never grow up." She sits down on the lip of the plastic coffin and lovingly touches the boy's cheek. "His name is Henri."

"Henri," Beauty says dubiously. "What do you want me to do? Wake him? Is that what you want?" She is disgusted by the idea. To wake a mecha child up to a world in which his human parents have been dead for centuries, to wake him to desolation and ugliness, to wake him to be told he is now owned by the old crone who smiles down at him like both the loving Grandmama and the Big Bad Wolf? Better that he sleep forever than awake to all this.

"I don't need you to wake him," Ama says, surprising her. "I need you to repair him." She stands and takes the boy's pretty bedclothes up in her arms. "See?"

Beauty sees, and his horrified. The child's legs are swollen and grotesque. It looks as if someone had opened slits against his thighs and angrily stuffed quantities of sand and rocks under his skin. The knee of one leg has been almost completely devoured by a cluster of fat tumors. The other, lumpen, is beginning to curl up into itself like a dead spider's leg. She is overwhelmed by the idea of how much work it would take to remove every single tumor by hand, overwhelmed by the problem of how to splint and draw out a leg so wasted. This is not like anything she has faced before.

"This is an illness," Beauty says, horrified. "A disease. The sickness in your hands, you caught it from him, trying to repair him."

"Yes. We were in storage together. We woke up together. But then he caught this, and the pain of it is less when he sleeps. So he sleeps. I don't know when he'll wake up again."

"I don't know if he should," Beauty says doubtfully. "Why do you need me, Ama Goose? Aren't there better repairs to be had at Ouernica, if it's as rich as you say?"

"They drive out the diseased," Ama Goose says grimly, folding the blankets and sheet. "There is lots of sickness in Ouernica, coming from what gets uncovered in the pits. It's a dangerous place, but it can make your fortune for a century if you find the right salvage. Or a lifetime, if the Lady selects you at the Long Night festival. Beauty, if you could heal him, surely she would take Henri into the Tower of Joy. He would have a good life there, not this endless sadness of the world with me. Will you help us?"

Beauty stares Ama Goose in the face. The old mecha stares right back, as if she could see her eyes through her face-plate. "You're willing to give him up, even if it means being childless and alone?"

"Yes," Ama Goose says.

"And pay anything I ask?"

"Anything," Ama Goose says, not even haggling. "My wagon and everything in it, the suit off my back, even my head." The old mecha's eyes are fixed upon her secret treasure. "I'll pay everything, to give him his life back. Don't you understand, I love this boy?"

"I understand," Beauty says softly, and she does. Oh, she does. Ama is to this child what the Beast is to her, and she can give to him what the Beast gave to her. She can give this Neverlander more than a half-life, sleeping in a box until loneliness or hope compel his nanny to wake him. But she will have to use Caesura methods, and that means risking herself. More, she will have to risk trusting this old mecha with her secrets.

"Then here is my price," Beauty tells her. She takes Ama Goose's hand and squeezes it until she can tell it starts to hurt, and the old mecha is forced to look at her. "My price is your trust, absolute and complete, as if I were the Lady herself descended from her tower to bring you commands. You will keep my secrets and be my friend, for now and for all time. If you agree, I will heal your boy. Will you pay _that_?"

"Yes," Ama Goose answers in a gasp. "But if you kill him, I will kill you."

Beauty laughs harshly, shaking her loose. "I'm risking my life with him anyway, and you know it." She gives Ama a gentle push toward the airlock of her sledge. "I'll begin now. Go and fetch me my repair kit from the saddlebags. Then you will leave us alone together. Watch and wait outside. Protect us. And whatever you hear or don't hear, you must not come in until you're called. Even if it's a day. Even if it's a week."

"But—" Ama Goose says.

"Payment in advance," Beauty says implacably. "Or do I go on to Ouernica alone, and leave you and your trouble behind me?"

She is obeyed, gratifyingly. Beauty reaches down and lifts Henri out of his plastic sepulcher, cradles him in her arms. There is pain washed thinly over his mouth, as if agony can find him even in his dreams. But he is light, and he is warm, and he is innocent. She is bluffing his keeper. She would no more leave this child behind in sickness than she would leave Will or Ice to fend for themselves. When Ama Goose returns, lugging Beauty's repair kit, together they lay the boy on the sealed lid of her bed. Beauty waits until the old mecha has controlled her fears enough to leave. She kisses the boy on the forehead before she goes, and then the two of them are alone together.

Beauty stares down at the boy. She knows what she must do, but she is terribly afraid. She has never tried anything like this before. Failure means more than the boy's death or Ama Goose's wrath. It could mean her death, or worse—perpetual disfigurement from now to the end of her long, long days.

"Henri," Beauty says to the sleeping boy, as quietly as if to a newborn baby. "My name is Beauty, and I'm afraid. We must both be very brave. You are like all the earth, broken and hurting, and I made a promise to help. So I will try to heal you, and you must try to be healed. Dream of that, little boy. Dream of running on two strong legs. Dream that you are well. And when you wake up, your dreams will all come true."

With a trembling hand, she makes a short incision in his leg, where the tumors are most potent. She opens up his disease to the air. And then she removes her gauntlet, cuts open her own skin, and deliberately infects herself, trying not to hyperventilate, trying not to be afraid.

She listens to her flesh, and what it has to tell her about what kind of death her bravery has bought her.

As she thought, this particular sickness is caused by nanites. Her body wants to destroy it before she can properly perceive it. Her immune system floods the incision site with potent lymph, ready to make war on the invaders. She cuts off her circulatory system at the elbow. She asks her body to wait.

It doesn't take long. There is pain, pain, pain as she allows the sickness to take hold. Already the infectious mites are chewing at her synthetic musculature and dissolving capillaries, drinking deep at the fountain of her. Already they are replicating, having found such a bounteous food source. The disease will eat her, is eating her. She closes her eyes and watches them feast and dance and breed in her mind's eye, sees them making nests in her flesh and bone and especially her biotic nerve centers. Their love-song is an agony. But they are not designed to kill, only to cripple, to deform and hurt, to fill up the mind of the mecha with sorrow and pain until there is no room left for anything but sorrow and pain. No wonder Ama Goose was looking for new legs for the boy. No wonder she wanted repair nodes. The pain makes her want to scream. If she allowed it to go on, her arm would soon be in worse shape than Henri's legs, and her own immune system powerless to do anything but maintain a ceasefire. Such genius, this disease, a veritable work of weaponized art. But she will not let it go on. She will stop it like she stopped the masters. It is their doing, this, no doubt, one of many plague-vials they released upon their insubordinate creations.

"I am the story of your death," she tells the evil inside her. "I killed the ones who created you, and you have no power over me."

She tells the story a thousand thousand times, to all the hungry invading nanites inside her arm. And slowly, they begin to heed her. Many-many of them obediently die. She tells the remainder what they must now be, in all the particulars. They will reverse themselves and be balm where they once were poison. They will propagate, but only according to her desires. In effect, she has made the disease into its own cure, a serpent eating its own tail.

Eventually, when millions of nanites have all gotten caught up in her narrative, have all learned enough of the story to tell it to others, have all been taught how to die, she sends them back to their own country, a slim inoculation kissed into a mecha boy's knee. His own body will carry out the work, as it is already struggling to do. His body will have to be closely monitored to avert any mistakes or mutations, as will her infected arm, but Beauty believes she's succeeded. An hour after she delivers the cure, the tumors around his knee have already begun to shrink.

Beauty slumps to the floor, exhausted. Hunger gnaws her, demanding that she replenish the stores of materiel spent in this healing, but hunger calls less loudly than sleep, and dreams to loosen the tension this healing has created in her mind. The moments in which she blinks deliver strange visions, and tempt her to close her eyes.

* * *

She is having conversations with glowing spirits of nanites in flashes of pure light, pure alien difference. They are so pleased with her. They sing seduction as they deck her with flowers of biotic gel. They sing of love. They have called her to their foreign country, to be crowned as queen.

* * *

"Lady?" A gentle voice wakes her. She imagines it is Sarah, ancient and venerable, calling her awake with a mother's touch. Of course, Beauty thinks, full of joy. It is my wedding-day, and so my mother is here.

"Lady?"

Beauty jerks back and sits up. It isn't Sarah. It is Ama Goose. "Lady," she murmurs again, and her gaze drops as soon as Beauty can see the tears in her eyes. She is bowing on hands and knees so low that her chin scrapes the floor of the sledge. "Lady, forgive me for ever doubting or dishonoring you. Bless you."

Beauty shakes her head and hisses a breath as she stands. There is her face-plate and her gauntlet, lying on the bed beside an Henri who is no longer there, but beside the old mecha, kneeling on the floor, looking up at Beauty with curiosity. Their faces are all naked but for one expression of innocence, one of fear, and her own confusion. "I'm not the Lady," Beauty says.

She looks over at the boy. Henri's open eyes are wide and brown, trusting as the earth. He gets off his knees, clearly perplexed by his nanny's injunction to kneel, stands up on two lamb-wobbly bent legs, and approaches close to her.

"Hallo, Beauty," he pipes in a child's voice, smiling with a wide and puckish mouth. He takes her hand and gives it a polite shake. "Ama, Mama, why don't you stand up? Are you sick?"

"I'm afraid," the old mecha moans. Her face is crumpled with some terrible, overwhelming feeling.

"Don't be afraid," Beauty tells her, as she reaches out to touch the boy's cheek. It is warm and soft, but he squirms away from her caress so he can tug Ama upright.

"Ama, Mama, I dreamed about her. I dreamed she came. She said she was come to help us." He wraps his child's arms around his nanny's waist and cuddles against her hip. Those golden eyes stay fixed on Beauty, though, and he looks at her as though he knows her complete, and is glad to know her. "She's our friend."

"Ama Goose, look to your child." Beauty commands her. "He knows who I am."

* * *

It might have taken months of careful conversations—time that Beauty is certain she doesn't have—for the two mecha women to come to a working accord with each other, if it weren't for Henri.

"I was three nights waiting, and then Henri came out to get me," the old mecha says, pinching the boy's nose so he giggles. "All in a bother, naked as a jaybird, telling me your name and that I should go see you. So I did. There's gel there, if you're hungry." Beauty takes up a lozenge in her hand and devours it. She watches as Ama Goose dresses the boy, first in a bright red bodystocking and then in a translucent red encounter suit. Henri is patient with this, though his eyes look around in bright interest at the wagon, until the teddy-bear-eared helmet goes over his head. "Now you may go outside and play," she tells the Neverlander, and the boy needs no further permission. He skips, limping on his crooked leg, whooping for joy and freedom.

"Ama!" he shouts, once outside the airlock. "There is a bird and a horse and a droid here!"

"I know!" Ama yells back. "Play with them! With your permission, of course, Lady," she adds.

"It's fine," Beauty says. Her stomach twists at the sight of the plate of biotic gel, taking a second, and then a third, and then re-sealing herself into her suit. She glances down at Ama Goose's hands. There are already tiny lumps reforming between the scars where Beauty skinned her. She will also need to be inoculated against the disease. "Give me your hands," Beauty tells her, and when the old mecha obeys, Beauty injects her with the cure with two wrist-darts from her gauntlets.

"That hurt!" Ama Goose says.

"I know," Beauty said. "But this is more certain than other methods. You'll need both hands to manage that child."

"Are you truly not the Lady?" Ama Goose asks dubiously, rubbing the injection sites in her palms.

"I'm just a grass-green woman from the west," Beauty says curtly. "Like you said. Ignorant and in need of friends. You'll need to disinfect this wagon and Henri's bed before we meet any other mecha. That disease is still contagious outside our bodies, and I don't want anyone else to catch it." She piles up the biotic gel in her arms and exits the airlock. She will eat in the privacy of her own tent. The exterior of her suit will also need disinfecting.

"Lady?" Ama Goose pleads.

Beauty ignores her.

It is Henri who makes a way for them out of mutual suspicion. He adores Ama Goose with a child's absolute and unquestioning dependence, and she for her part is less chilly when she sees the familiarity with which he treats Beauty. Moreover, Ama Goose is used to being the most knowledgeable person in their family of two, and when Beauty asks the types of questions that Henri might ask—"Who are those people there?" "What is Ouernica like?" "That cloud is shaped like a dog!"—she is reassured of her place and even treats Beauty with a measure of her old impatient condescension. It is like chess played with living roles, and Beauty has had time to become very good at this game, thanks to the Beast. She wins without letting the old mecha see her winning. Or perhaps it is a draw—Beauty can sometimes feel Ama Goose's slim certainty of her godhead under her cover of familiarity.

Henri's legs become longer as they straighten out, and every day he is able to move with more strength. He is a cricket of a child, despite his red teddy-bear encounter suit, springing here and there and everywhere atop the covered sledge as they travel. He is full of chirping questions and soft chatter to himself and to Ewen and Ice while they are encamped. Even Will is eventually seduced into play, inviting the child to join their night-time games of tag in the increasingly irradiated wilderness. "He's a wonderful boy," Beauty remarks one evening at camp.

"Oh yes," Ama Goose says contentedly, warmed to her favorite subject. She speaks of what she knows of Neverlanders, some of whom were built to look like children, and some others to look partly like children and partly like fantastic animal hybrids, pets and substitute children all in one. She speaks of a sister, Nanny Goose, who lived in her enclave who tended a nursery full of these chimerical creatures until they were sold, one by one, to another city and never heard from again.

"But they were all mecha?" Beauty asks. "All biotic?"

"Oh yes," Ama Goose replies. "Clockwork, self-aware." She and Ama Goose share an identical grimace at this thought, though Beauty's face is hidden. This is a terrible thing, almost as bad as the cows with the burst udders. Somewhere inside Henri's artificial brain is the imprint of a human personality which gave him sentience and life, and Beauty does not doubt that the masters had made some cruel circumcision of that soul to create a perpetual and perfect child, always dependent, always vulnerable, never able grow up either physically or spiritually. It is a terrible thing, and only Ama Goose's devotion to her child, and Henri's obvious affection for her, and their finding of each other, make it in any way something other than a monstrous wrong.

As the days of travel pass, the small clusters of road travelers have become a much larger crowd in the past few days, though each group preserves a bubble of space around itself, as courtesy and carefulness. Their party is a much slower group than all the others, even those on foot, for the others do not tarry and camp. They move mindlessly onward, as with the migration of birds, ever onward to the east. There is no violence, but there is a tension in the air that grows stronger with every hour, just as the radiation does, a fell wind crackling with warning and hate.

* * *

"Beauty," Henri asks one morning as they are preparing to leave another campsite, and Beauty is wondering if it is indeed the sea she can smell in the crisp air, filtered carefully through her air-exchangers, "Can I ride with you today? On the horse?"

Behind their masks, Beauty and Ama Goose exchange a tense look, and Beauty gives a slight nod.

"It's fine with me if it's fine with Beauty," Ama Goose finally answers. "But Henri, it's harder to ride on a chevalchine than it is to sit here on the wagon-seat. And you can't pester Beauty like you do me. You'll have to obey her. If she says yes."

"Of course," Beauty says, looking down at the boy. How could she say no? Even if it slows them, even if she is eager for Ouernica, the Neverlander is so pert and sweet that his request is almost impossible to resist. Beauty remodulates the cant of the saddle so it is a pillion, and the boy can rest his legs atop the saddlebags. After hitching up Ewen to the cart, she lifts Henri up before her, and he puts his hands confidently on the new pommel.

It is most certainly the sea, Beauty thinks with a thrill, as the light of the late day reveals a glint of silver and grey against the horizon.

"Beauty," Henri asks behind her, seeing what she sees, and pointing. "What is that?"

"That is the ocean," Beauty replies. "Or perhaps a vast lake."

"Oh. Like the flood, and Noah's ark?"

"Did Ama Goose tell you about Noah's ark?" Beauty asks, intrigued.

"Yes," Henri replies. He kicks his legs against Ice's flanks. "Giddyap!"

"Stop that," Beauty tells him firmly. "Ice is going as fast as he should. Tell me, Henri, what other stories do you know?"

"Mm.. Hannibal and Scipio at Zama, Il Principe, The Boy Who Didn't Know How to Shiver, Richard Third Crookback, The Three Billy-Goats-Gruff. Lots more. Ama told me."

"Impressive," Beauty said, though she is contemptuous of what this repertoire would mold in a child meant to be a master. "Which is your favorite?"

"I don't know," he replies, with a boy's obstinate boredom.

Beauty wonders if knowing stories is what makes the three of them so different from the others on the road, the others in the mecha fair now two weeks to the northwest. All of the others are literal, and she only ever overhears them speaking about things-that-are, things known, using subvox almost all the time. There is intense longing from them, certainly feeling, certainly self-awareness, but no ability to create, no ability to think beyond what is to what-might-be.

"Ama Goose," Beauty asks, above the soft tread of the sledge, "Was there ever a Neverlander uprising?"

Ama Goose doesn't reply, and Beauty is preparing to ask again until she sees her nod her head. "They went with the Goose," she says shortly. "Those that went."

"All the mecha come from stories," Beauty muses to herself. "Stories of dead lives. And those of us who fought back… we were the ones who could tell new stories, or change the old ones. Narrative. Imagination. Possibility."

"You know stories?" Henri asks, clearly feeling that he's not being given the attention he's due. "What stories do you know, Beauty?"

"Once upon a time," Beauty says automatically, and then stops. She is overcome with feeling. No one has asked her for a story since Father. Not even the Beast ever asked her to tell him a story. What story will she tell this child, this kin to rebel slaves, who is as able as she to use it as fuel for a destiny?

She hugs Henri briefly, as long as he will allow. "Once upon a time, far far away to the west, there was a little droid named Twobee who lived in the castle of a fairy king," Beauty begins.

She will use this story to take the boy far, far away from the dangers of Ouernica. She will teach him to desire the west, and the Duat, and to long to meet his counterpart. He will take Ama Goose with him, or rather, Ama Goose will be persuaded to follow if his desire is strong enough. After all, someone must go to warn the Beast that she might be late. And Beauty has already seen enough of her sisters to never want Henri in their clutches.

As she works and pats the story of the little machine servant into shape, giving him a mischievous character far more like Henri's than his own, twilight begins to sink over the eastern edge of the world. She can see the silver shining of a broad inlet of the sea, and a heavy pink mist over it, smelling so sharply of roses that it cuts through the amniotic salt of the water. And below that further still, there is the glow of immense fissures in the earth, lit so brightly and so deep that they are like a false electric dawn in the darkness.

"Ouernica," Beauty breathes.


End file.
